Conventions -- or information patterns -- for various sorts of information content in Twitter messages have appeared in many ways. The use of '@jennalee' to indicate a reply to or a mention of another Twitter user has been adopted by the authors of Twitter, but the great majority of future microsyntax will not undergo the same sort of standardization by fiat. Instead, a generalized sort of experimentation is going on, a sort of competition among various ideas for adding a higher degree of structure to the form of Twitter messages, like the emergence of hashtags ('#sxsw'), the adoption of stock tickers ('$AAPL'), and the newly proposed geoslash for location ('/San Francisco CA/'). These conventions are intended to be both human- and machine-readable, and our goal here is to:
- identify conventions in the wild, as users or applications begin to apply it
- document the semantics of the microsyntax we find or that community members propose, and
- work toward consensus when alternative and incompatible conventions have been introduced or proposed.
- creation of reference architectures or open source examples when individuals or groups decide to move into experimentation.
In a sense, we are focusing very much on the tactical level here. The purpose of this organization is principally ethnographic: is to identify and characterize what is going on, organically, in the open web, and to create a forum where we can discuss what we have found. Secondarily, we will also make recommendations, after working through alternatives, and we will try to find common ground when disagreements arise. Thirdly, we will advocate for and against specific microsyntax, or the implementation of microsyntax by various software tools, such as platforms like Twitter, Identi.ca, Facebook, Friendfeed, Yammer, and so on, and external applications interacting with these platforms like desktop clients, or the like.
Organization Of Microsyntax.org Website
We have dedicated forums for Proposals and Sightings, and we invite anyone to register for an account and make posts there, or comment on others. If and when some group determine that there is a strong interest in pursuing a proposal aggressively a special interest group can be created, as has been done for OHME and Emergnecy Codes. In those cases we create an additional top level page, and configure the page as needed for that group.
