When Annotations launch, the Annotations Explorer is going to be launched along with it. The Annotations Explorer will indicate which Annotation are tending, most used, and most adopted by developers. To accompany this, there will also be a wiki page for developers to share with each other the ways they are using Annotations are how they are choosing to describe them (this discussion is already taking place here and here). The goal here is to have the developer community start agreeing on what the most common Annotations should look like, ie: a book, song, or movie.
One of the primary concerns around Annotation is that every developer is going to have their own way of describing an Annotation, which in turn is going to make it exceedingly difficult to standardize and take advantage of Annotations. My hope is that the Annotations Explorer will address this concern and help developers come to a consensus about how the most predominant Annotations should be described. Twitter isn’t going to enforce any of these Annotation types on developers, so someone who despises the most adopted way to describe a book can still go off and do their own thing. However, I’m not entirely sure why they’d want to.
There isn’t any indication when the Annotations Explorer will be launched, but I suspect it’s going to arrive within 1-2 months.
Tags: annotations, annotations explorer, twitter, Twitter API
