Machine tags for Twitter
2008-05-07 12:52 by Peter Asquith —
With the advent of applications such as Brightkite and Twitter bots, people are starting to Tweet what are, essentially, machine data via Twitter. It occurs to me that a prefix of “#m” for example before the data would allow Twitter clients to ignore the information or re-purpose it into a more meaningful message, in much the same way that Flickr hides machine tags.
What do you think?
« Webstock workshops in Auckland (and elsewhere)
Copyright © 1997-2008, Peter S Asquith. Most rights reserved.
You, sir, are a genius!
I think that’s an excellent technical solution.
I do wonder whether the Twitter folks would agree with that philosophically. As in, whether they would choose to accommodate those uses in such a way. Just like microformats frowns on non-visible data almost to the point of excluding it entirely, why would Twitter want to encourage non-visible traffic on its system?
Unless, of course, they can come up with a compelling way of that re-purposing you mention.
Twitter is already incredibly flexible in terms of what you can use it for, but such a protocol would really multiply the possibilities.
On an implementation note, though, the escaping character would need to be something other than a hash. Maybe ‘%m’ instead?