Aral Balkan

Update: Since Twitter has announced annotations, you will be able to use annotations for Twitterformats. I've thus stopped maintaining the Twitterformats.org site and – blush – actually let the domain expire. So don't go there! :)

You delete a tweet and it appears in strikethrough in your followers' timelines…

…It's your birthday so your Twitter client notifies your followers…

…You wonder whether you should wear your red shirt or white shirt to your party, so you run a poll, right in your Twitter client, using nothing but tweets, and then share the pie chart of the results with your followers…

…Jenny's organizing a yoga meet-up and wants to know whether you'll attend. She sends you an invite, you agree to go, and your Twitter client automatically adds it to your calendar application. All using nothing but tweets…

…You notice a typo in your latest tweet so you change it and your followers are notified…

This is not some future Twitter scenario based on Twitter adding features to Twitter and the Twitter API.

You can do it all today with Twitterformats.

How it came about

I initially thought up Twitterformats at the end of May when I was trying to arrange to see a movie with my friend Paul. I couldn't help thinking how much better the experience would have been if Twitter understood the meaning of my tweets; if it understood that I was asking Paul if he wanted to see a certain movie with me at a certain time; if it wasn't just 140 dumb characters. (This led me to draft the first Twitterformat, tRendezvous – which is also the first Twitterformat to use URLs and Microformats.)

So I got the Twitterformats domain, thought about it some more, and then promptly proceeded to sit on for about six months as life and other projects got in the way. In those six months, I kept feeling the need to extend Twitter in various ways. So, once I had submitted 'Avit to Apple, I finally decided to create the Twitterformats site, and to put a little effort into it to do it right. I wanted to make sure that Twitterformats supported a decentralized workflow for new proposals and implementations and could be run by the community. It took me a little over a week to create the site and write up the initial batch of Twitterformat proposals and the various guides and that's what I'm launching today.

What are Twitterformats?

Twitterformats are decentralized, community-driven, human-readable/writable, machine-parseable, lightweight client-side APIs that extend Twitter to solve practical problems.

Twitterformats are community-contributed and implemented in an entirely decentralized manner and do not require input or effort from Twitter itself. They are a dynamic, organic alternative to waiting for Twitter to add a feature to its API.

Twitterformats empower the community, and Twitter client authors, to expand Twitter – its vocabulary, features, and expressiveness – in an organic, evolutionary manner.

Take a look at some of the currently-proposed Twitterformats mentioned above to get a feeling for how they work: (See note above.)

• tDelete: for updating your followers when you have deleted a tweet
• tBirthday: send birthday updates to your followers and be notified of your friends' birthdays
• tPoll: create a quick straw poll using just your Twitter client and tweets
• tRendezvous: arrange meetings with your Twitter friends (example of URL & Microformat use in Twitterformats)
• tStrike, tInsert, and tReplace: for making changes to existing tweets

If you want to see more, look through the full list of currently-proposed Twitterformats.

Get Started

To get started, read through the summary on the Twitterformats home page.

To find out how the decentralized proposal and implementation system works through pingbacks, read the Proposal Ping and Implementation Ping sections.

If you want to author Twitterformats proposals, check out the Syntax Guide, Naming Convention Guide, and the Proposal Template.

For other information, including how Twitterformats relate to Microformats and other similar technologies, check out the Twitterformats Frequently Asked Questions.

Get Involved!

I can't wait for your involvement and feedback and I can't wait to see the wonderful things you will do with Twitterformats.

Comments

• [...] Der Web Guru Aral Balkan stellt sein Projekt Twitterformats vor. [...]

  by Die nächste Evolutionsstufe von Twitter: Twitterformats? on 2009-12-14 15:31:49

• @Ronny: Creating a greasemonkey script and share them among Twitterformats users would temporarily solve the problem :)

  by Alper KANAT on 2009-12-13 09:22:54

• @Aral: I see you point, and I tend to agree with you. It should be interesting to see how Twitterformats evolv, how the community reacts and most important: What will client developers do...? @Alper: Lol, too bad I'm running Safari (but I'm too much of a Twitter-addict to regulary check the website, so no problems there ;) )

  by Ronny on 2009-12-13 13:47:11

• [...] be interested in seeing take off? Visit Twitter Formats but also I highly recommend you read Balkan’s announcement about the project, it will address some of the most immediately concerns, particularly in regard to [...]

  by Twitter Formats, a way to truly evolve Twitter. on 2009-12-14 13:12:38

• How is this different or completely to the existing microsyntax efforts? http://microsyntax.pbworks.com

  by Chris Messina on 2009-12-12 22:05:16

• Hmz, I don't really know if I like the idea. Twitter is so much fun because it is plain simple. You post your message, your followers read it. End. Adding a long list of TwitterFormats might extend the experience. However I wonder how you would like to see TwitterFormats implemented. I guess you'd like to see Twitter clients implementing these formats. So when somebody Tweets a /strike, the client would show the change, and not show the /strike-Tweet. Right? So what happens to the actual Twitter-stream online? On the website? It would become quite messy with the unprocessed TwitterFormatted Tweets, don't you think? I think it's interesting to broaden the horizon of possibilities with Twitter, but I'm wondering about how exactly you see this working. Great job, Aral ;)

  by Ronny on 2009-12-12 22:18:14

• Congrats and nice work Aral,a definte way to go in the semantic way. Will be looking forward to it if I can contribute anything at all. And thanks for the initiative,which you always are.

  by saumya on 2009-12-12 22:21:04

• Hi Chris, They're different in a couple of ways – I tried to address it at the end of the FAQ (as I found out about your microsyntax suggestions via Loren's note on the latest Tweetie release). Basically, Twitterformats are not about marking up data in tweets or slightly altering the syntax of existing metadata conventions; they're verbs that extend Twitter's functionality and add new features to it. Also, constitutionally, Twitterformats.org is not an organization with a chair, investors, meetings, etc. I've tried to build a completely decentralized, community-driven system. People contribute Twitterformat proposals by creating a blog post on their own blogs and notify this site via pingback. There, they either live or die based on whether or not they garner community support and whether or not Twitter client authors implement or ignore them. There's absolutely zero bureaucracy and no one plays gatekeeper. Twitterformats is a very practical, decentralized initiative to allow the community to extend and evolve Twitter in an organic manner. As such, it will live or die, just like individual Twitterformats, based on whether or not the community embraces it. No one joins committes, there are no advisors, everyone can contribute.

  by Aral on 2009-12-12 23:08:50

• Hey Ronny, Thanks for your feedback :) I definitely do not want to see Twitter become any more complicated and completely agree that it is the simplicity of Twitter that makes it special. However, we are also using Twitter to about 1% of its capabilities – there's _so much_ we could be doing with it. Making Twitter more intelligent – by adding semantics to _the conversation_ is inevitable. I'd like to see it happen in a decentralized manner, not under the control of any one entity, and driven by the community and Twitter client authors. Twitterformats.org, in this scenario, is simply a facilitator that brings the community's Twitterformat proposals and Twitter client authors together to extend Twitter in an organic manner. So, yes, to answer your question, a client that implements the tStrike Twitterformat would not display the actual tStrike tweet. The tStrike tweet is a _verb_. It would act upon it and display the results (the existing tweet with a word or phrase struck out). If the Twitter stream got messy for other Twitter clients (or the web site) it would mean that a certain Twitterformat was seeing widespread use. In which case, it would be in the interests of Twitter or other Twitter client developers to implement that particular Twitterformat. In other words, that's just part of the organic, survival-of-the-fittest nature of Twitterformats.

  by Aral on 2009-12-12 23:15:37

• Twitter has already announced they have a way of adding data to tweets that works via web or mobile. In that announcement it was mentioned this unreleased feature is being considered as a way for the new retweet functionality to allow comments.

  by Twitter_Tips on 2009-12-13 03:25:21

• Hey Aral, Thanks for the clarification. Sounds like we use the exact same process for microsyntax — fancy that! Microsyntax is essentially developed through an observe-initialize-refine-propose-iterate model, same as Twitterformats. Anyone can make a proposal, and anyone can create their own "slashtags". Whether they get adopted is based on market penetration and adoption, as there is no central authority governing (or that *could* govern!) which tags will resonate in the wild. It does seem like Twitterformats are an attempt to define certain command-line-like actions for Twitter — though several proposals to that effect have already been made on the microsyntax wiki (though I doubt that many have really taken off). I'll be interested to see how this effort evolves — as the microsyntax project (which was really started by Stowe Boyd — I just helped with some of the initial thinking!) is similarly intentioned! Cheers.

  by Chris Messina on 2009-12-13 21:37:07

• Just a quick update. I let the Twitterformats domain expire. To tell you the truth, there was absolutely no response from Twitter until they announced Annotations so it's for the better. Once Annotations are live, you can use those in the same way (and they're a better solution).

  by Aral on 2010-10-12 12:47:58