An Early Look At Twitter Annotations Or, "Twannotations"

Mg Siegler

MG Siegler is a general partner at Google Ventures and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. Previously, MG was a general partner at CrunchFund. And before TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked... → Learn More

Saturday, May 8th, 2010

During a presentation in London today, Twitter engineer Raffi Krikorian offered up an early glimpse of what Twitter’s highly anticipated new annotations feature (or, as he refers to them at one point “Twannotations”) will look like. “Threw together a quick, and extremely preliminary view on what @twitterapi has been working on — and what I feel has the ability of being a game-changer on the platform — Annotations,” he writes on his Posterous blog. Krikorian also posted his deck, which I’ll embed below.

Of note, Krikorian says that every tweet annotation will have a “type,” and each type can have several attributes. This information will apparently have same “visibility policy” as tweets themselves, which seems to mean “public” unless you set your account to private.

More significantly, Krikorian notes that you’ll be able to put anything you want in annotations. Twitter will have some suggestions to help developers get started, but they won’t be restricting anything, apparently. Twitter will also apparently be publishing annotation stats to the public. There will be some sort of “Explorer” product that will give stats about most used, most adopted, and trending annotations.

Check out the full deck for a few other tidbits of information, including about the APIs.

Company: Twitter
Website: twitter.com
Launch Date: March 21, 2006
Funding: $1.16B

Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.

→ Learn more

Tags:
blog comments powered by Disqus