Steven Levy Talks Microsyntax, But Doesn’t Use The Term

In a recent piece at Wired, Steven Levy talks about the microsyntactic conventions that make Twitter what it is:

[via Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter]

Twitter’s evolution spawned a new grammar, and the Twitter community created many of the conventions now integral to the service. This includes hashtags (marked with a # symbol) and the @ prefix before a username. Companies using Twitter to track financial information adopted the $ sign to identify stock names. Heavy retweeting by tech guru Tim O’Reilly helped popularize the practice.

To Twitter fans, 140 characters wasn’t a limit but a jumping-off point. It might have seemed obvious that something as brief and ephemeral as a tweet was unsuitable for a press release, policy analysis, or novel, but people have used Twitter for these things anyway, sending multitweet streams that constituted a brand-new Internet genre.

Essentially, Twitter left a ball and a stick in a field and lurked on the sidelines as its users invented baseball.

I agree that Twitter is a weird company, too, Steven.