8 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2020
    1. Oh, and from a language/design perspective, you can actually turn regular words in a sentence into channels, just as many people do with @replies. For example: I’m coming to #barcamp later today.

      Because the use of hashtags is inline and you can turn regular words into hashtags (and therefor channels), there is no friction to do so.

    2. It also enforces actual use in the wild of tags, since no evidence of a tag will exist without it first being used in conversation. This means that representing channels in tagclouds across the site that grow and fade over time, and are contextual to all of Twitter or to a single user, is the ideal interface for displaying this information.

      Hashtags have the added benefit that they won't show up for others if they're not used.

      If you look at which hashtags are being used (trending), you get a taxonomy of micro-contexts, ranked by popularity, with which you can navigate Twitter. All from the bottom up.

    3. I also like that the folksonomic approach (as in, there are no “pre-established groups”) allows for a great deal of expression, of negotiation (I imagine that #barcamp will be a common tag between events, but that’s fine, since if there is a collision, say between two separate BarCamps on the same day, they’ll just have to socially engineer a solution and probably pick a new tag, like #barcampblock) and of decay (that is, over time, as tags are used less frequently, other people can reuse them — no domain squatting!).

      The folksonomic approach (user-generated tagging) is beneficial because it allows complexity to emerge bottom-up.

    4. Every time someone uses a channel tag to mark a status, not only do we know something specific about that status, but others can eavesdrop on the context of it and then join in the channel and contribute as well. Rather than trying to ping-pong discussion between one or more individuals with daisy-chained @replies, using a simple #reply means that people not in the @reply queue will be able to follow along, as people do with Flickr or Delicious tags. Furthermore, topics that enter into existing channels will become visible to those who have previously joined in the discussion. And, perhaps best of all, anyone can choose to leave or remove topics that don’t interest them.

      Twitter's hashtags form a dual purpose. They label a status with a certain tag, telling us something about the intended context of that Tweet.

      The ease of which makes it frictionless for anyone to jump into the conversation.

      But they also equip an interested eavesdropper with the ability to follow along with a conversation. This idea (at the time this was being discussed at Twitter) was already happening with Flickr and Delicious tags.

    5. This is how it works in IRC, and how it needed to work in Twitter.

      The idea of:

      When you use a hastag and the channel with that name doesn't exist, it gets created, is an idea that came from IRC.

    6. Now, in thinking about implementing channels, it was imperative that I not introduce any significant changes into the way that I currently use Twitter any more than I have for other features that have been added to Twitter (for example, @replies or direct messages). Channels would need to be a command-line-friendly addition, and one that would require absolutely zero web-based management to make the most of it (to draw a distinction, Pownce fails this test with its Friend Sets, since it requires use of their website to take advantage of this feature).

      The requirements [[Joe Messina]] laid out for a concept of "channels" on Twitter was that:

      1. It shouldn't add any friction to his current use
      2. It shouldn't require any web-based management to make the most of

      Twitter of 2020 satisfies these requirements. You just type #something, and you can click on that hash or search for it to see results.

    7. Jaiku comes closest with their channels implementation, making it extremely easy to create new channels (simply post a message that begins with a hash (#) and your intended channel name — and if the channel doesn’t exist, it’ll be created for you):

      [[Joe Messina]] details an example from [[Jaiku]] where you can create a channel by simply posting a message that starts with a hash (#). If the channel doesn't exist, it will be created for you.

    8. I’m more interested in simply having a better eavesdropping experience on Twitter.

      [[Joe Messina]]'s reason for suggesting the hashtag was his interest in having "better eavesdropping experience on Twitter"