In the meantime, I guess it just takes using hashtags… and getting a feel for using them in practice.

I’ve pinged Jack from Twitter and his response was along the lines of “every word in a tweet is a tag, so we’ll use natural language processing” but that kind of ignores what this idea is all about… which is adding intent and a nomenclature outside of normal language (i.e. #barcampblock). I should add that I don’t think everyone will (or has to) adopt the hashtag convention for it to work. But it seems like something in the meantime that gets us some data to then see what we can do with it.

Yeah the URL thing seems like a small issue to me as well. I am sure that if they wanted they could even dynamically parse the fragment identifier into a fully-formed URL while maintaining the appearance.

So what can we do now :)

Oh, and as for the URL thing… IRC URLs already work that way (I realize that hash is used as a fragment identifier) so Twitter could simply intercept these requests and process them into a full URL:

http://twitter.com/tag/barcamp
or http://twitter.com/channel/barcamp (a la Jaiku)

I actually think the hash convention is good - just that it wrinkles the web version a bit when accessing channels - but probably not in too difficult a mechanism - since your goal was twitter.com/#channel

I think both use cases for how those tags can be used are totally out there and in play now. I don’t think I meant to suggest the channel director concept away from there. I don’t see private memberships, per se. I think the idea is much the same in spirit.

“While I agree that it looks funny so far, that’s because it’s raw and no interface adjustments have been made to accommodate this new convention.”

Without a doubt this can improve the web version - but it doesn’t help me with the IM/SMS incarnations. My own personal habit is to generally be alerted via IM. I use the web interface minimally. I’m sure the web usage is still significant, but not sure how much of the spectrum is accounted for via that medium.

“What’s cool about this convention (rather than groups) is that the more people use it, the more it adds to understanding both what people are individually talking about and what topics are hot across Twitter.”

I agree.. Just to re-iterate, my suggestion was not to create groups, though that seems like an potential, organic offshoot of putting people with expressed similar interests together. My alignment is much more with the traditional sense of tags as we know them now - a tag (and often collection of tags) provides the context for understanding the associated object. One aspect we’ve not talked about is that we also know where there’s interest - even if a stream is not associated with that interest yet.

“You mentioned using mailing list convention for marking context… do you mean using something like [barcamp] (brackets)?”

I meant more in terms of the dual identifier. I would suggest that it should be as you’ve outlined: user#channel

“And, as for your final example, I’d reformulate it like this”

I know there’s a number of ways to refactor this into some syntax, however, it won’t prevent people from generating spam either. While we can hope that #people #won’t #hash #every #word, if there are blank canvases out there the you-know-whos will find it.

A couple responses.

What I like about the hash convention is that it’s flexible — it can be used either to tag content on a personal basis or to give a sense of shared context or place (like [Twitter developer] Britt’s favorite example where wants to tell people that he’s going to #dolorespark — whether they’re following him or not). Or, as Stowe suggested, it can be used for personal recognizance or content tagging, as he did recently using the #travels tag.

While I agree that it looks funny so far, that’s because it’s raw and no interface adjustments have been made to accommodate this new convention. In the Twitter UI, it’d be easy to turn these into links to the channel pages — or to expose a tag cloud, as I did in my mockup. What’s cool about this convention (rather than groups) is that the more people use it, the more it adds to understanding both what people are individually talking about and what topics are hot across Twitter. Simply trying to count the preeminence of each word uttered on Twitter leads to somewhat interesting trendmaps, but doesn’t really give us a look into the long tail of actual topics that people are interested in.

You mentioned using mailing list convention for marking context… do you mean using something like [barcamp] (brackets)? Not to be too nit-pickey, but that adds an additional character and could be confused for words actually intended as supporting text whereas the hash prefix will (I think) be rarely confused for anything else (besides phone numbers).

And, as for your final example, I’d reformulate it like this: “Just to #SF, heading to #BarcampBlock to meet @factoryjoe”. That’s how people address people as it is — so that wouldn’t change when referring to other Twitter users. You might also not even need the #sf tag if that felt like overkill; the use of #barcampblock would be enough to establish context and location that it actually wouldn’t end up being that much different from your current updates.

Thanks for chiming in.. I was actually just writing you…

I think you raise some good points.. let me see if I can address some of them:

“First, it requires learning something kind of new — and remembering groupnames that might not be all the intuitive for those using IM or SMS to participate in Twitter.”

I totally agree, I think learning something is always a slightly difficult proposition. I’d probably counter, of course, that loads of twitter functionality is toggled by people who have taken, or been instructed, to do so. Certainly I would love something backed in, but it seems we still end on a convention of best practice.

As for remembering usernames, I actually have a harder time with that than anything else. Twitter on my contact list collapses a universe of individuals. I generally direct message just a few people who I’ve committed to memory or can easily find in my stream of previous messages.

On the other hand, topics are something easy and could likely be managed webside as you noted they are considering. It’s somewhat easy for me to know I’m interested in “motorcycles” and decide to follow that channel. Doesn’t seem that far off from how the majority of people use the address bar in their browser.. they type the word they’re looking for.

“In other words, if you strip the groupname out, how do I, a recipient via SMS or IM, infer context?”

This is a really good point and something I glossed over. I think the convention of mailing lists is a good example. Seems that a 2 part identifier would be required - say gregarious@barcampnyc. I think the context is indeed important and wouldn’t want a case where it didn’t get passed along.

I think this example you give…

“Wow, totally great sessions today at #sxsw!”

… is really well conceived. I think that the channel designation reads well. I’m just more curious, or troubled, by the situation where it’s more like (from stowe):

“I support the hash tag convention: http://tinyurl.com/2qttlb #hashtag #factoryjoe #twitter”

While this leaves the context, it does strike me as odd looking. Of course, this could also seem sort of strange to me if it were:

“Just to #SF, heading to #BarcampBlock to meet #ChrisMessina”

Your last point on password shrinkage, I totally am with you on that. I don’t really want more than one account on Twitter, but current system doesn’t offer me much choice.. in the LittleGrams instance, I actually could use just one (and that’s the likely case) but for the sake of experimentation I’m willing to play it out to see how it would work.

While it’s a sound proposal, I have two issues with that.

First, it requires learning something kind of new — and remembering groupnames that might not be all the intuitive for those using IM or SMS to participate in Twitter. Whereas I will *learn* people’s usernames on Twitter because I’m constantly seeing them in updates, will group messages that arrive via SMS or IM prepend the groupname AND the member name?

i.e.: _barcamp gregarious: Can’t wait to get to the Block!
or gregarious: [barcamp] Can’t wait to get to the Block!
or_barcamp Can’t wait to get to the Block!

In other words, if you strip the groupname out, how do I, a recipient via SMS or IM, infer context? If, for example, you say something like “Wow, totally great sessions today!” and you sent it to “g sxsw Wow, totally great sessions today!” you have context that the recipients don’t… making your update even *less* meaty than before.

In contrast, using my public syntax (just like @replies that give you a sense for directional communication), if you said “Wow, totally great sessions today at #sxsw!” I’d both have your context, and others not following you would get to see the update in the general #sxsw channel. By removing the group context from the message, you actually *lose* meaning.

Now, the only way that groups could work without the context/channel tag is if you somehow already know that you’re receiving messages in the context of a group — just like when you’re browsing a topic thread in a forum on the web or looking at folders in your email. While there is a larger universe, it’s clear that you’re only seeing a subset of that universe; it’s also fairly trivial to navigate up and down that tree because the interface affords you that ability natively.

When you’re living on the Twitter command line and you have no “ls” command, all of a sudden you’re in an unfamiliar forest in the dead of the night, with branches and trees coming at you from all directions, completely distorting your sense of place and sensemaking.

I should add one more point, especially w/r/t LittleGrams. I got Larry to set up the Ma.gnolia user on Twitter last fall — and I believe that his was the first company posting company updates on the site… While I think that there is still some merit to maintaining separate channels for companies, in some ways I think that Larry would be better off posting Ma.gnolia updates using the #ma.gnolia tag… That’s one less account to maintain, one less password to remember and one less set of replies and direct messages to monitor. It also means that other people can post to that channel and it’s not monopolized with one way communications. As well, if Larry’s friends don’t care about his Ma.gnolia updates, they can easily unsuscribe:

leave lhalff#ma.gnolia

And, if people don’t care about Larry’s stuff but want the Ma.gnolia updates, the reverse is simple as well:

follow lhalff#ma.gnolia

Similarly, I could do this:

follow #littlegrams or follow gregarious#littlegrams

instead of having you maintain multiple Twitter accounts. That connects me to a real person behind the service (yay for humanizing faceless corporations!) and also means less work for you.

Whaddya think?