Chris Messina’s New Microsyntax
Chris Messina, well known for creating the hashtag (see Chris Messina on Twitter Tags) has some more ideas up his sleeve. Recall that when Chris suggested the hashtag, back in 2007, he intended to be used in a somewhat different way than it has evolved to: these things rapidly grown out of our hands, once they start to grow in the wild.
Chris suggests using the slash character, ‘/’, as a general indicator of metadata, as well as introducing a number of English prepositions, as what he calls ‘pointers’, but which are intended as prepositions.
[via New microsyntax for Twitter: three pointers and the slasher]First, I’ve decided to migrate from encapsulating my metadata in parentheses to using a slash delimiter (”/”), which, for shits and giggles, we’ll call “the slasher”. This saves you ONE character, but hey, those singletons add up!
Now, the pointers. “Pointers” are short words with different
intentions. A group of pointers should typically be prefixed by ONE
slasher character. You can daisy-chain multiple pointer phrases
together, padded on both sides with one whitespace character. There
should be NO space following the slasher. Hashtags should be appended
to the very end of a tweet, except when they are part of the content of
the message itself and indicate some proper name or abbreviation.
Normal words that would be part of the content of a tweet anyway SHOULD NOT be hashed.
So Chris is suggesting a sort of fixed syntax for tweets, where non-encoded information would be at the start, then a ‘/’ would set off the back end of the tweet with various prepositions and nouns, and all hashtags neatly stacked at the end. Chris also makes a plea that ‘normal words’ should not be hashtagged.
The various ‘pointers’ he suggests are things like ‘by’, ‘via’, and ‘cc’. A post following these conventions might look like this:
This is history. /via @barackobama cc @chrismessina #election2008
While a more casual twitter might be this:
This is history. via @barackobama cc @chrismessina #election2008
Messina’s proposal has some merit, since it could lead to some increase in clarity. But I don’t think the ‘/’ character adds much to the inherent meaning of the prepositions, which are, after just English words used in pretty much their usual way. These won’t easily pass to other language groups.
It may be that ‘via’ and ‘cc’ could be better represented by some shorter microsyntax, one indicating a source and one indicating a target for information transfer, but what I have seen emerge are the words themselves. Various schemes for the use of ‘>’ or ‘<’ seem arbitrary — which is pointing to and which from the author? — and nothing consistent seems to have come up.
There is a fledgling use of various characters that set off an original comment or tweet, and a comment attached to that:
This is history. -@barackobama | A great day! #election2008 @chrismessina
I have seen other characters used, like ‘»’, but the idea is that the original, leftmost part was said by someone other than the author of the tweet, but the rightmost part, following the ‘|’, is the opinion of the author.
I also used the ‘-’ to represent ‘by’ or ‘via’ when preceding an @username, which I think is both shorter and language nuetral.
And the ‘cc’ idea is captured by putting the names of users at the end of the post, which is sort of cc-ish and doesn’t require new microsyntax: the ‘@’ is doing the work, really.
One thing that Chris doesn’t mention is that I suggested the use of the ‘/’ or ‘Geoslash’ character to represent geolocation (see Geoslash), and that has been implemented by a few tool vendors, like Nearyoo. With the folks at Twitter hatching their own geolocation plans, we’ll have to see where all that leads.
It’s clear that there is a real difference between this —
I will be landing in /New York City:tomorrow:8:00pm/ Hope to see you @chrismessina #w2e
— and the geolocation of where I was sitting when I posted that tweet, which is what Twitter’s geolocation is going to capture.
So, despite my avid support for microsyntax.org emerging as it is needed, I think we should have only as much as we need, and no more.
