Twitter is just introducing annotations for tweets. These are a semi-structured way of adding meta-data to a tweet. For the average user, annotations are “hashtags on steroids“.
Annotations are semi-structured as there is no formal registration process for the namespace and key. Sitepoint have a good article on the Twitter annotation format. This post is an attempt to collate some annotation ideas into a unified place.
There are already some annotations contained in tweets. These include:
- username
- in-reply-to tweet
- timestamp
- location
- contributors
Here are some more. Some day I may clean this up and try to define a standard format and namespace.
- Mood (happy, sad)
- Changed mood (before-after)
- Weather
- Privacy level
- Image/video/sound clip URL
- General URL
- Licence (how can other people sue your tweet?)
- Copyright holder
- Distribution (global / specific country)
- Joke
- Source / attribution
- Current transport (walking, driving, train, etc)
- Traffic
- Split personality
- Translation (including to non-geek)
- Product price
- Special offer / discount
- For sale / wanted
- Currency
- Rating
- Event date/time
- Topic or category (if you generally tweet about a few categorizable topics)
- Group ID (many tweets in the same group could be shown as 1 in supporting clients)
- Vote / poll ID (vote for an option in a poll)
- Proxy (allow other people to use your account, like cotags)
- Question / answer
- Listening to artist / album / song
Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments.