One of the side effects of Twitter’s 140-character limitation is that users are coming up with their own microsyntax and abbreviated Twitter grammar to make their Tweets more expressive. If your are merely retweeting someone else’s tweet, for example, you acknowledge that by placing a “RT” at the beginning of your micro-message. If you are replying publicly to another user or just referring to them, you indicate that with an “@username.” You can even add hashtags to a tweet so that it shows up in searches for specific topics (please use “#twittergrammar” if you are going to RT this post).
New conventions pop up every day. To make sense of them, and develop new ones, Stowe Boyd is launching Microsyntax.org tomorrow. In a debut blog post, he insists that it is not a “standards body,” but that is effectively what it might become. And we need one, because Twitter isn’t setting any standards. You can follow @microsyntax to keep on top of the latest Twitter lingo.
Microsyntax is not just about coming up with commonly used abbreviations. It is also the way that structure can be added to the mess that is Twitter today. Hashtags, for instance, lets you find all tweets about a particular subject or event. We probably need more microtags for different purposes.
The problem with the microsyntax approach, however, is that it appeals mostly to the command-line crowd instead of to the average user. Nevertheless, if a microconvention becomes popular enough, then Twitter itself can adopt it, as it has with the @replies (although it has messed that up by mixing in retweets that simply mention your name and aren’t truly replies, but I digress). What’s your favorite microslang and what do we need to add to the microlexicon?
lol… as if MSN didn’t kill a kids ability to spell… now twitter..
Slowly Twitter leads its users into spelling disaster with untouched abbreviations. But it’s kind of cute if Twitter comes up with its own sets of abbreviations for words that each user can opt to use. Yes, like those in a chatting room.
Very interesting stuff… I’m sure lots of gammers love this.
http://twitter-...victory-of.html
I think http://ftags.com have the most elegant solution thus far. They’re like intelligent hashtags that are searchable and short to conserve space.
spelling is overrated
hitesh@cs.cornell.edu
eh if you can’t do it by now….
Twtter (and TC) has reached the height of silliness and uselessness with this latest post.
Seriously… you guys… seriously.
Just think how you’ll look back at all this 6 months from now when Twitter’s hype dies out.
Yes.
Finally, something to explain to new twitter users the tags that we use. It’ll be great for the website we’re developing, http://beta-twi...er.letstell.com .
Great info thanks!
What happens if the hype doesn’t die down. It’s gone on long enough already, right?
I am usually one of the first people to check out a service, and one of the much later ones to adopt it for personal use for this very reason (what if its just hype).
But, I now use Twitter regularly. I use it to communicate with friends.
I think this is a good initiative, and I have been looking for something like this for some time.
Is it just me but this guy should win the award after this statement
“..I have been looking for something like this for some time.”
Really you’ve been looking for a service like Twitter before it existed.
What other services are you looking for? Email me so I can have a multi million dollar product.
Pretty sure “i’ve been looking for something like this” was in relation to the site microsyntax mentioned in the post & not twitter itself. Genius.
Isn’t this more of an “urban dictionary” than an attempt at a standards body? And the little train that could said: “I think ICANN, I think ICANN.”
the limit on twitter will be it’s downfall. on facebook status updates, you dont have to say “and 2day i ws on tchcrnch and red an artcle” i went on twitter 1 time, saw stupid typing like that, and never went back.
like 40% of twitter registrations which dont return
And yet, unlimited space to comment didn’t help make your comment here coherent or grammatical, did it?
Look we know Twitter is great for you blogger types who quickly get hundreds of followers: but for the average user, who gets far, far fewer, Twitter is not a revolutionary service. In the real (read: non tech-blogger) world, people are busy with their jobs and aren’t tweeting and reading tweets all day. Which is why Twitter’s retention rate is so low. So a few months from now when Twitter’s growth inflects, stalls, and follows the path of MySpace, I hope you fess up to having been consumed by the buzz.
Normally I’d agree with an anti-hype/buzz sentiment but at least this traffic chart by Alexa differs:
http://alexa.co...om#trafficstats
Even if Twitter’s retention rate was only 5% (a 95% loss of new Tweeters), that 5% keeps accumulating and since the it’s 5% of a huge number that’s a lot of persistent growth. Also, the kind of people drawn to Twitter are, as you point out, bloggers and other writers and these people server as an ongoing loudspeaker for Twitter attracting a continual stream of new propsects. Also, writers love Twitter because they have to scour tons of information for things to write about and Twitter makes that process much easier since people are forced to write concise terse messages, perfect for rapid scanning.
I use the microsyntax to find followers that are into the same kind of music as I am. It seem to work well However I strongly disagree with the article saying that it was a wrong move to include all tweets that include @username. It helps me track anytime I am referred to on Twitter. Of course that can also be done with Twhirl or any other app, but it’s nice that it is on the site as well.
Everything is twittered!
Use #twitcrunch if you think twitcrunch… I mean techcrunch… isn’t sucking up to twitter enough.
No. It’s http://crunchtweet.com
Besides, ask yourself if you’ve ever had to go back and reference a Smiley ASCII art collection list to see what various
and :-p really mean.
Erick is exactly right when he says that “[...] microsyntax approach [...] appeals mostly to the command-line crowd [...]“.
With newer Twitter clients coming out there will also be those that seek to IM’ify those ASCII art elements as visual art assets (see also this actual comment).
Companies like microsyntax could even expose a Gravatar-esque asset pointer to something in Amazon S3 and you could have a choice of visual compliments like LiveJournal mood icon sets.
http://www.live...om/moodlist.bml
hey, don’t mess with my survey! Use #twitcrunch
I’ll post the real-time results in the next century.
These guys should hook up with Twitter:
http://www.tech...nches-web-play/
In the real (read: non tech-blogger) world, people are busy with their jobs and aren’t tweeting and reading tweets all day. Which is why Twitter’s retention rate is so low.
In the real (read: non academics) world, people are busy with their jobs and aren’t uploading web pages and reading websites all day. Which is why the WWW’s retention rate is so low.
I don’t have a personal Twitter in the normal sense, but I have been using it — for a very unusual purpose. And I’ve been sort of inventing my own conventions. *points up to link*
I thought the @ thing was built into Twitter originally? And the hashtags just make me wonder who did it first. Somebody must’ve.
My two cents on whether Twitter is that big a deal: I used it to gauge reactions when RIN-NE first came out. Aside from that, I don’t feel qualified to judge.
10-4, good buddy.
Muito bom esse blog informação e fonte para conhece novos lugares.
wtf. way too much crap on twitter.
The character limitation will not be it’s downfall. That’s the reason it became so popular in the first place.
Slang evolves far faster than the attempt to document it. So will it be with the use of the 140char line. FUNoWadIMean.
Just think about the scene from Blackadder where he meets “Doctor Johnson”, a man who has created a dictionary…
http://www.yout...feature=related
I personally like what brevity as to offer us via SMS’s
character restriction. Too many abbr. seems like cheating, but slang has its purposes.
That said, I’m curious if Chinese twitter users find the limit less of a problem, seeing as most words are only 1-2 characters long.
Wow there’s five articles about Twitter on the homepage and still none of my friends/family are Twittering.
Almost all of them are Facebook members so is Twitter only for nerdz & starz?
spoken and written english went to hell long before twitter. microsyntax is the ebonics of this period in time. next, we’ll have microsyntax of microsyntax… alogorithms of microsyntax that shrink down all possible meaning to a single letter “a”. the 140-character limitation is more of a test of one’s ability to consolidate meaning into more succinct packets as opposed to long, meandering blather (such as this one, perhaps). want to master the english language, try words, not abbreviations.
#yawn
Surprised Twitter Data hasn’t gotten a mention here yet:
Twitter Data is a simple, open, semi-structured format for embedding machine-readable, yet human-friendly, data in Twitter messages. This data can then be transmitted, received, and interpreted in real time by powerful new kinds of applications built on the Twitter platform. Here is an example Twitter Data message:
I love the #twitterdata proposal! $vote +1
http://twitterdata.org/
See also:
http://civiliti...iority_Notation
That “Star Priority Notation” guy is just trying too hard. Nobody wants to have to carry around a dictionary of star codes with them for when they twitter. Serious Usability FAIL.
I’m already on record as thinking hashtags are stupid (it’s HTML “meta tags” all over again). Most microdata/syntax/slang ideas are worse. They reduce human-readibility of messages in exchange for minimal gains in computer-processing. The amount of people who benefit from a marked-up tweet is almost always going to be less than the number of people who inconvenienced by the markup.
See yesterday’s article at The Next Web:
http://thenextw...tter-meta-tags/
(Full disclosure: I’m the author of the article, so I’m likely a bit biased.)
The twtr fad is over. Early adapters have moved on.