notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

This post is much-linked, and usually I’d put it on delicious, but I’m going to dump in some big quotes and vaguely organised thoughts that, even with the new 1000 character limit over there, would probably be a bit much.

Twitter is user-extensible.The @syntax for referring to users, hashtags, and whatever you call the use of $ as a special symbol for reference to financial instruments, were all user-generated innovations that, because of Twitter’s simplicity, allowed for third party services to be layered not just on the API, but on the content.

For a long time, I’ve been annoyed at the cruft of hashtags and the like in Twitter messages. At-replies I’m less annoyed by, because they’re explicitly supported in the user interface I use (I’m one of those strange people who prefer the web interface to twitterrific, twhirl or somesuch). Hashtags, though, seem pointless: search.twitter.com indexes them as if they were ordinary words. The new use of $ for financial symbols also seems trivial.

On the other hand, these innovations all seem to be used far more than “proper” metadata is on other services. For example, Flickr’s tags are fairly well used, but machine tags (which are the most useful sort of hidden metadata) are still pretty rare. Perhaps I’m just going to have to accept that people aren’t good at entering things in complicated ways, and that emerging information from the nuance of conversation (to mangle a Stephenson quote) is the way to go.

In an aside on Twitter’s simplicity, there’s this:

New services likepeoplebrowsr are reframing service aggregation in a richer way, as a way of learning more about the people you follow, browsing the social graph. (Peoplebrowsr is still in alpha, but I think it has real potential as a social graph explorer, rather than as yet another people feed-reader.)

As someone who has wittered about aggregation a bit this year, I’m really curious about peoplebrowsr. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite seem to be doing what I’m looking for; roll on a true social graph explorer/aggregator.