What they are
An Annotation is simply structured metadata attached to a tweet. It will consist of a namespace, a key, and a value.
What might this look like? Here’s the example Twitter offers:
'annotations':
{
'iso':
{
'isbn': '030759243X'
},
'amazon':
{
'url': 'http://www.amazon.com/Although-Course-You-Becoming-Yourself/dp/030759...
}
}
They’re going to be flexible
Developers will be able to add namespaces, keys, and values to their heart’s content, so long as they don’t, as a sum total, exceed a fixed size. Marcel, a member of the Twitter Platform Team, claims that the fixed size will be 512 bytes, however, he suggests it may eventually be as large as 2K.
Everyone will be able to read and write from any namespace, key and value. That is, no one developer can own and protect a namespace.
They’re going to be accessible
Annotations will be directly embedded into a tweets payload and returned from the REST API. However, they won’t be accessible through the search of streaming API at launch.
They’re going to require patience
There is going to be Annotation growing pains. Twitter has chosen not to enforce a set of rules surrounding how Annotations are described, which is going to make a set of standards agonizingly painful to construct. Developers are going to have to be mindful not to trip over each other while they’re busy implementing Annotations. If they aren’t careful, the end user is going to be the one left frustrated.
Twitter’s hope is that standards will arise organically and be cultivated by its developer community. There is already a Twitter-meta Google Group that’s being spearheaded by Michael Bleigh with lots of talk surrounding standards for Annotations.
Ultimately, the utility of a single tweet is going to increase considerably with the introduction of Annotations – something I’m really excited about.
Say goodbye to hashtags and URL shorteners.
Tags: annotations, chirp, semantic web, social media, twitter
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