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How (slowly) we add metadata to tweets
Wednesday, November 25, 2009 by Dave Winer.
Why make an exception for geographic data or which app created the tweet or which tweet it's in response to, or that it was retweeted by 7 people and who they are? Or who wrote it? And when? 
These bits of data all live outside the 140 character "limit."
Every good idea people come up with for Twitter involves latching a new piece of metadata to a tweet. And in the middle you have a conflicted, slow and arbitrary (and opaque) decision-making process, controlled by one company.
Shouldn't the architecture of tweets be open to any kind of data that anyone thinks of?
If you make a Twitter client please, start pushing your users' updates to a RSS feed on a server outside of twitter.com. It's just a backup. That's the first easy small step down the path of free evolution. Once someone does that, there are more steps.
To get an idea of what's possible, I recommend reading A better design for Twitter retweets. Wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to wait for Twitter Corp to try this out?
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Dave Winer, 54, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.
"The protoblogger." - NY Times.
"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.
One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.
"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.
"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.
"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.
Dave Winer
© Copyright 1994-2009 Dave Winer
.Last update: 11/25/2009; 4:22:57 PM Pacific. "It's even worse than it appears."
