Twitter Annotations Testing Starts Next Week Through The Streaming API

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

MG Siegler is a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. His focus is on Apple. Prior to 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 in Hollywood and in... → Learn More

Twitter Annotations are the next big feature a lot of people are excited about. With them, both users and clients will be able to add more context to tweets, which should make for a richer experience (and more useful data). A new post today in the Twitter API Announcement Google Group indicates that testing of Annotations will beging as early as next week.

To be clear, this is just a test of the feature through the API, and it will not yet be available to users. On June 7 through June 11, Twitter plans to flip the switch on some sample Annotation-enabled tweets in the Streaming API. Clients using this API should start to see tweets with these payloads appear. Some will be populated with sample Annotation data, some won’t be, Twitter’s John Kalucki writes.

Assuming general stability, on our end and yours, we’ll eventually leave annotation delivery turned permanently on,” Kalucki notes.

Twitter recently updated that Annotations Overview wiki page with some more information about what you can expect from the feature. Of note, Twitter has listed 11 “recommended” types of Annotations so that people can get started using them. Those are:

  • webpage
  • review
  • song
  • movie
  • tvshow
  • book
  • product
  • stock
  • offer
  • topic
  • event

Also worth noting is that Annotations will be limited to 512 bytes initially (though Twitter hopes to increase that limit over time).

This past weekend, Twitter held a Annotations Hackfest at their headquarters. Here’s one account of the event.

Company: Twitter
Website: twitter.com
Funding: $1.16B

Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...

Learn more

Sponsored Ads

blog comments powered by Disqus

Sponsored Ads

Sponsored Ads