A Modest Proposal For More Microstructure: Twitter /Locations

[Update 14 December 2009: I have adopted Ross Mayfield’s term ‘geoslash’ in place of ‘location tags’. See Geoslash at Microsyntax.org’s wiki for a fuller explanation.]

Hashtags (Twitter tags) were proposed by Chris Messina, and in use by Chris, me, and others before tools existed to do much with them, aside from search. In similar fashion, I am proposing a new sort of microstructure, just a little bit ahead of tools to support it.

The idea is similar to tags: use a distinctive character to set off some microstructured metadata, although in this case, the metadata is location, and the character is ‘/’, the slash.

Imagine I posted this on Twitter [as I did yesterday]:

stoweboyd Just landed at /JFK

The intention is obvious: to indicate /location. And, of course, imagine that Twitter-smart applications can consume this stream of /locational cues and do interesting things with them. I am involved in the development of one such application, but certainly anyone can exploit this information, if and when the Twittosphere wants to start microstructuring this way.

I also looked and ‘/’ is easily accessible on cell phones, which is an important issue, considering the ‘just arrived in an airport’ or ‘hanging out in a bar’ use cases.

Unlike Messina’s tags, I am proposing that multiword locations be indicated with a closing slash, like this, that I posted yesterday:

stoweboyd hanging at /Starbucks, 93 Greenwich Ave, NYC/

This way we can avoid all the problems with one word indicators. (I wish we could have avoided this with Messina’s tags, too, as I wrote way back when.)

There are other aspects of /locations that I am working on with my partners, about which more to follow. My first hope is to get a basic convention out there, and existing search mechanisms can be tweaked to do the right thing with the format of /locations.

A last note: some people have used tags as stand-in for /locations, but I think that is wrong. Tags are better thought of as concepts, while location is very tangible. More importantly, the use cases — while they may have some overlap — are very different.

For example, If I see a tweet with /White House, Washington DC/ that means the place, and not the conceptual overtones of #WhiteHouse, which probably is part of a political discussion. The same holds with /French Laundry, Napa CA/ (the place) and #FrenchLaundry (the cuisine or experience), or /Evian (the place) and #Evian (the water).

So, I invite everyone to start localizing with /locations. I promise you a Twitter appliance to make sense of them is on the way.