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Hugo Chávez to Make Terrorist Threats, er, Join Twitter

cgseo — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 04:10:00 +0000

After getting the short end of the Twitter stick, Venezuela president, Hugo Chávez, called it " terrorism ," " a battle trench" and a "current of conspiracy. "The Internet cannot be free!" he proclaimed. Since he has taken six television channels he didn't like off the air and imprisoned reporters , who knew what he would do? Well, it turns out he intends "to open his Twitter account soon to wage the battle online," according to Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela's chief telecommunications regulator. Sponsor With Venezuela's once invincible-seeming oil-economy now in the toilet and his approval rating diving below 50% perhaps El Jefe feels he has no choice. Since mass media in Venezuela is under constant threat from its strongman head of state, his opponents and critics have monopolized the microblogging platform and that platform is becoming popular. Reuters outlined its recent growth. "The microblogging site has seen an explosive rise in usage in Venezuela to more than 200,000 active accounts. With growth of over 1,000 percent in 2009, Venezuela now has one of the highest rates per capita of Twitter users in Latin America." The moment you shut people up, you no longer speak for them. This has started to dawn on some of Chávez's once-vocal partisans. It may take longer for those whose solidarity is limited to their Che t-shirts. May I suggest you Sharpie #FreeVenezuela across yours? Top photo from Open Democracy Bottom photo by Corey Harmon Discuss

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Hugo Chávez to Make Terrorist Threats, er, Join Twitter

Twitter, DMCA Take-downs & the Prior Restraint of First Amendment Speech

cgseo — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 21:58:00 +0000

Last week, the big news in DMCA takedowns was the sweeping removal of Hitler parody videos . Earlier this year, it was Google suddenly wiping out six separate music blogs . Today, it's the removal of a tweet . While this might not seem like a big deal on the surface, it leads to some much bigger questions about free speech, what content should fall under a proper DMCA take-down and whether or not the DMCA is a legal method of applying censorship by any content owner. Sponsor Here's the story as told by TechDirt: The story involves a music blogger named JP, who runs the appropriately named JP's blog . Not surprisingly, JP also has a Twitter account , where he mostly seems to post links to his blog posts. One such post was about the leak of the new album by The National. That post includes a link to Amazon where people can purchase the new album... and also a link to a download of one song (in MP3 format) from the album. According to JP's blog post on the subject, Twitter sent him a message last Thursday "in response to a DMCA take-down notice". The email, he writes, read as follows: jp917, Apr 22 03:10 pm (PDT): Hello, The following material has been removed from your account in response to a DMCA take-down notice: Tweet: http://twitter.com/jp917/statuses/12499491144 - New Post: Leaked: The National - High Violet http://jpsblog.net/2010/04/20/leaked-the-national-high-violet/ JP denies posting any link to the leaked album in his tweeted blog post, saying that he will not bother filing a counterclaim to the take-down. He also links to an article in Plagiarism Today from a year ago that alleges that Twitter's handling of DMCA take-downs and counterclaims is problematic and that "there is clearly an organization issue here and that's leading to confusion." While last weeks' take-downs of parody videos may have been "overbroad take-downs of legal content" , as the Electronic Frontier Foundation asserted, this sort take-down may go an extra step, beyond constitutionally protected First Amendment speech. With the YouTube take-downs, at least there was copyrighted content present, although it may have been used according to the law in the end. In this case, according to JP, there was neither pirated content nor a link to any DMCA-violating content. While TechDirt argues that "specifically, nothing in the tweet itself is infringing -- which means that the DMCA take-down for the tweet is bogus, and a violation of the DMCA itself", we spoke with David Sohn, senior policy council with the Center for Democracy & Technology , who said that the question might not be so cut and dry. Section 5.12D of the DMCA relates to cases involving "information location tools" and "links". "One possibility here is that Twitter has gotten a take-down notice that might not stand up as a totally valid take-down notice," said Sohn. On Sohn's advice, we asked Wendy Seltzer, founder of ChillingEffects.org , what this all meant and she explained that the burden of proof lies with the person creating the content and not the platform. All the platform, in this case Twitter, needs to know is that the complaint me be valid and that, by removing the offending content, they cover themselves legally in the eyes of the DMCA. Whether or not section 5.12 D of the DMCA actually applies doesn't really matter. The introduction to her recent paper, "Free Speech Unmoored in Copyright's Safe Harbor: Chilling Effects of the DMCA on the First Amendment" (.pdf), speaks clearly to the problem we saw when first reading this story: Each week, more blog posts are redacted, more videos deleted, and more web pages removed from Internet search results based on private claims of copyright infringement. Under the "safe harbors" of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Internet service providers are encouraged to respond to copyright complaints with content takedowns, assuring their immunity from liability while diminishing the rights of their subscribers and users. Paradoxically, the law's shield for service providers becomes a sword against the public who depend upon these providers as platforms for speech. The problem with the current format of the DMCA, especially in the case of something like a communication platform such as Twitter, is that a DMCA take-down notice becomes an extremely effective means of silencing information for a legally mandated period of 10 days. In essence, it provides those who wish to silence a voice a quick and legal means of enacting what is called a " prior restraint ", something clearly prohibited in First Amendment law. "When non-infringing speech is taken down, not only does its poster lose an opportunity to reach an audience, the public loses the benefit of hearing that lawful speech in the marketplace of ideas," writes Seltzer in the paper. Twitter offered this response: "Twitter regularly receives DMCA takedown notices. We strive to balance the interests of our users and copyright holders by reviewing each notice. After determining whether the notice is compliant with the law, we also consider other factors such as whether the notice is abusive to our users, or fails to take fair use into consideration. You can read more about our DMCA process here: http://help.twitter.com/entries/15795-copyright-and-dmca-policy "We are always working to improve our transparency. Users are notified immediately when content has been removed from their account. In this situation, we responded to a request to remove a Tweet containing a link to download content from an unreleased album. After reexamining our decision, we believe this was the correct first step. If the affected user believes we have made a mistake or that the notice is in error, the appropriate thing for the user to do is file a counter-claim. "We believe that the reasoning of the DMCA claim and its origin should be transparent to both the affected user and other interested parties. We are working on further steps to improve access to this information." So, our next logical question here is: Since this post includes the email from Twitter, which includes that original link to a blog post that supposedly linked to infringing content, can it too be removed according to the guidelines of the DMCA? Discuss

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Twitter, DMCA Take-downs & the Prior Restraint of First Amendment Speech

Twitter Acquires Cloudhopper, Looks To Become Highest Volume SMS Program Worldwide

cgseo — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 18:17:00 +0000

Twitter announced this morning its acquisition of Cloudhopper , a startup it hopes will help it "become one of the highest volume SMS programs in the world." As Twitter notes in its blog post, the service was originally born on the back of SMS and the move looks to further emphasize this distinguishing factor. Sponsor The acquisition seems to be a clear signal that Twitter is looking to expand further into areas where cost is a primary factor and the majority of users would interact with the service using SMS instead of desktop computers, smartphones or laptops. "Twitter's 140 character limit was designed specifically to allow for any tweet to be read in its entirety whether you're using a rudimentary mobile phone, or a more sophisticated Internet enabled device," the post explains. Now, the company processes nearly one billion SMS tweets a month and that number is growing. So how does Cloudhopper fit into this? Cloudhopper "supplies the underlying software and infrastructure to reliably scale and geographically disperse some of the world's highest volume messaging programs" according to the company's website. The service handles both SMS and MMS (text and multimedia) messaging in North America, Europe and Africa. As part of the acquisition, Joe Lauer and Kristin Kanaar will be joining Twitter's mobile team. Discuss

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Twitter Acquires Cloudhopper, Looks To Become Highest Volume SMS Program Worldwide

Facebook Accounts for Half Social Traffic; StumbleUpon 2X Twitter

cgseo — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 17:25:26 +0000

Out of the seven social media platforms considered in web analyst firm StatCounter's latest look at social media websites as drivers of traffic, Facebook unsurprisingly comes in with nearly half of all traffic. The site takes a look at social media driven traffic and gives us a look at how the lay of the land has changed over the past year. Sponsor The top three social media sites a year ago were StumbleUpon , Facebook and MySpace , in that order. Now, Facebook has taken a clear lead, with nearly half of driven traffic, with StumbleUpon in a surprising second place position, accounting for nearly a quarter of all traffic, and Twitter just behind that with one out of every 10 hits to websites from social media. Myspace, on the other hand, has virtually disappeared, dropping from 16% of hits to nearly 1% this month. It will be interesting to see where these numbers go, as yesterday Facebook announced some very interesting changes to its platform , including a web-wide "like" button, that shares a user's activity with a single click. With Facebook already dominating social media driven traffic, we have to wonder if this number will only skyrocket with the new sharing and recommendation functionality. The same can be said for Twitter, which last week announced Annotations , a whole new meta-layer of data which will be appended to tweets. This new feature could add some seriously interesting new functionality in this summer and increase Twitter's already strong presence as a driver of traffic. Discuss

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Facebook Accounts for Half Social Traffic; StumbleUpon 2X Twitter

TwitterClaims: Be First In The Twitter Username Land Rush

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:24:59 +0000

Last week after Twitter's Chirp conference, Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land asked Twitter Co-founder Evan Williams when we would begin to see the release of inactive and deleted Twitter usernames back into the wild. The answer turns out to be soon for some and later for others, but the question remains - how will we know when that name is finally available? Well, two developers, Blake Crosley and Luke Woodard , have jumped onto this goldrush and created TwitterClaims . Sponsor According to Sullivan, Twitter is still trying to figure out the proper way to handle the situation, as some usernames have been used but have recently sat inactive, while others were swept up in mass name claims by squatters and others still have simply been abandoned. (Sullivan notes an anecdote by Williams of one person who registered more than 10,000 names in one fell swoop but has done nothing with them.) So if you've been eyeballing that perfect Twitter username, just watching it sit there and do nothing, TwitterClaims claims to have the answer. Simply enter your email address and give the site up to ten names that you're looking forward to having and the service will email you when the name becomes available. The service checks once an hour to see if the name is available and once it is, it emails you to let you know. Simple. It looks like anyone can claim a name, so once it becomes available and the notifiction is set, it's on. You'll still have to get there first, and others can be getting the same notification about that same username. Discuss

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TwitterClaims: Be First In The Twitter Username Land Rush

First Public Draft: Taking the Wraps off of OAuth 2.0

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 09:15:00 +0000

The OAuth 2.0 draft specification is out there. The efforts the group working on the specification are paying off in the form of an IETF working group submission. One thing that is clear is that there is a natural tension in following the processes of IETF and the hyper-innovation cycle of web standards that are now powered by the growth of social media. In this world, keeping up with all the work in the community itself is feat by itself. As proven recently, even aligning the naming of standards in our small community (xAuth, XAuth) proves challenging enough. With that said, we'll share we what we've learned about this version and what work has been incorporated in it. Sponsor For those coming up to speed on the issues surrounding OAuth 2.0, here is a brief summary of the state of the union: The OAuth Working Group in IETF generated a first draft of OAuth 2.0 . This group that is credited with this document consists of active leaders of both the Twitter API team as well as Facebook community standards team. A robust number of daily discussions are happening in the working group hosted at IETF include topics such as the default use of JSON that show the opportunity and challenge of growing the standard from a web-based to a broader set of devices and scenarios. One of the stated goals of the IETF OAuth working group is to maintain backwards compatibility with OAuth 1.0. From our sampling of the depth of change in scope and conceptualization of the standard, this may be a big deal for the group, especially if key members decide to legacy their support for the first versions. As part of the evolution of OAuth, there is the case of the OAuth WRAP Google Group . This group has forged ahead to develop profiles for scenarios seen as extensions to the profile OAuth 1.0A. This includes new ways to gain tokens bringing the use cases of Javascript or RIA applications. WRAP also redefines the dependency on SSL and provides a simpler way to get started using tools easily accessible to the web resource. With some changes noted, this work has been brought forward in the OAuth 2.0 public draft. David Recordon, a chief thought leader in the open web (also employee at Facebook) recently offered this summary " What's going on with OAuth ?" to help align the understanding of the evolution of the standard. Here we show one of the better known descriptions of the OAuth flow as provided by Yahoo. The annotations show a few of the areas that are under consideration for changes in OAuth 2.0 and/or in the work done in the OAuth WRAP group. Last week, at Twitter's Chirp '10 the Twitter API team gave this presentation, " Too many secrets, but never enough: OAuth at Twitter ". This document contains overview of the basic process of Twitter, commitment to the movement to OAuth 2.0, and discussion of Twitter's xAuth and OAuth Echos projects. Twitter Likes to Optimize Twitter is deeply intertwined with the inception and direction of OAuth. The company is both involved in the specifications but also is a lightening rod for discussion in the development community. In the Twitter blogs and developer groups, OAuth is being considered deeply in the trade-offs in implementation, design, and risk in the Twitter ecosystem. A few areas under discussion is how to remove the re-direction from the process, and also how to keep a running log of all account client accesses available to the user as a way to make sure users are aware and signaling proper account use. The Twitter API team has been willing to make change happen in the community by deprecating legacy processes, such as basic auth. With the changes coming in OAuth 2.0 the company may be in the best position to bootstrap developer adoption of the new standards. In this way, OAuth 2.0 need to adapt to the speed and need of the Twitter use cases, to avoid becoming like XML. XML is a good thing, of course, but when push comes to shove, JSON is lighter weight and more compact. This is helping it become the preference for data attribute exchange in APIs like Twitters that support OAuth. With the rise of the social ecosystem as the hub for authorization, it is becoming clear that the IETF efforts need Twitter as much as Twitter needs the IETF. This seems like a good balance that will guide use cases along the way to practical standards formalization. There are a lot of questions out there about OAuth 2.0. Top of mind is whether this technology release will see the effective join of Twitter, Facebook, and Google? Or, will the practical matters of business and strategy keep the standards intact, and the implementations as islands? What is your prediction for OAuth 2.0 and web resource authorization? Discuss

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First Public Draft: Taking the Wraps off of OAuth 2.0

Twitter Archive is Nothing Without Tools, Funding

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 01:45:00 +0000

When Twitter announced last week that every public tweet since its inception in 2006 would be archived in the Library of Congress, many people were excited. "The Twitter digital archive has extraordinary potential for research into our contemporary way of life," says James Billington , Librarian of Congress. "Anyone who wants to understand how an ever-broadening public is using social media to engage in an ongoing debate regarding social and cultural issues will have need of this material." Sponsor Developing the Methods to Curate Twitter There is little doubt that the opportunity for scholarship is immense - for cultural anthropologists, for historians of technology, and for academics in any number of fields. But some scholars are uncertain as to whether the resource will live up to the potential. With estimates of over 50 million tweets per day, the Library of Congress archives will contain a massive amount of data. "A MySQL dump from the Twitter database doesn't make an archive," says digital historian Tom Scheinfeldt . Scheinfeldt and other scholars agree that the move could be "tremendously useful," it will only be so if the proper tools and methodology are developed. Scholars are faced with the challenge of designing and building the curatorial tools for evaluating the data in the Twitter archives. But how will you be able to isolate a single conversation? How can you isolate the social graph of those involved? What sorts of API will be developed, both for internal and for external research? And while addition of annotations to Twitter will likely help for tracking future tweets, similar tools still need to be devised for archived data. Is There Commitment to Digital Scholarship? The donation of the Twitter archive seems like a great gesture. However, it remains to be seen if the preservation of social media information, including Twitter, will be a priority, both for the government and the technology industry. Although the Library of Congress and the National Archives have been committed to digital archiving for a number of years, programs like the Digital Preservation Program , have been historically underfunded . As historian Scheinfeldt notes, the announcement of the Library of Congress's acquisition of the Twitter archives is really just "the beginning of the story." Scholars like Scheinfeldt hope to be an active voice in shaping how the rest of the story plays out. Discuss

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Twitter Archive is Nothing Without Tools, Funding

Maponics Releases "Ultra-Local" Data Internationally

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 21:18:31 +0000

The neighborhood boundary data provider used by Google, Twitter, EveryBlock, CitySearch and other companies has expanded to include top cities in South America, Middle East, Africa and Asia. Norwich, Vermont based Maponics says it now also offers deeper coverage for leading US and Canadian markets, with new neighborhoods in 100 cities. Maponics says it is the first service to provide neighborhood boundaries on every populated continent on earth. Sponsor The company uses a combination of proprietary algorithmic and manual methods to determine where a neighborhood begins and ends; boundaries are updated quarterly. The data becomes most exciting when it's cross-referenced with other data sets. Twitter users, for example, will now be able to geotag and view Tweets by neighborhood in countries all over the world. If you're interested in learning more about Maponics, its sector and its relationship with Twitter, check out the excellent podcast interview DirectionsMag did with CEO Darrin Clement two weeks ago . Discuss

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Maponics Releases "Ultra-Local" Data Internationally

500 Billion Impressions: 16% of Users Generate Majority of Brand Impressions on Social Media Sites

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 18:07:18 +0000

Today, about 145 million Internet users in the U.S. use social web applications. In total, all of these users generate close to 500 billion online impressions on each other. According to a new report from Forrester Research , a mere 16% of online consumers generate a grand total of 80% of these peer-to-peer online impressions. Over 60% of all of these impressions come from Facebook. Sponsor Peer Influence Rivals Traditional Media As Forrester's Augie Ray and Josh Bernoff point out in this new report, 500 billion influence impressions about products on social networks, product ratings sites and blogs, comes close to rivaling other mass media outlets. Online ad impressions, for example, numbered around 2 trillion last year. Facebook is the venue for 62% of all of these influence impressions, followed by MySpace (18%), Twitter (10%) and LinkedIn (6%). Ratings and reviews make up 32% of these impressions, discussion forums account for 29%, blog comments for 24% and blog posts for 16%. As Forrester's analysts rightly note, it would be easy to dismiss Twitter, given that it only accounts for 10% of all of these influence impressions. These users, however, tend to be the "connected of the connected," which makes Twitter an ideal place to engage mass influencers. One caveat we would add here, however, is that it is hard to equate a post on Twitter or Facebook with actually impressions. Even though a user can have 1 million followers on Twitter, chances are that only a small number of these followers will actually see this message. It's also not clear how many users actually read blog comments and actively read ratings on sites like Amazon and Newegg. The study's authors acknowledge this in a footnote, but also note that they consider 500 billion impressions to be a conservative estimate. Who Are the Influencers? For marketers, of course, it is important to reach these 16% of mass influencers. Forrester divides these influencers into two groups: mass connectors , who maintain very large social networks, and mass mavens , who don't just maintain a large social network, but also have a strong desire to share their knowledge about a certain subject. On average, mass connectors tend to have a slightly higher household income ($98,100) than mass mavens ($89,000). These connectors are also slightly younger (32 vs. 38) and more likely to use the mobile Internet (55% vs. 46%). Discuss

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500 Billion Impressions: 16% of Users Generate Majority of Brand Impressions on Social Media Sites

What Twitter Annotations Mean

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 01:42:30 +0000

I love to sit on the beach. One of the coolest things about the beach is the number of layers of visual depth. Look at the sand and it's beautiful, but zoom your eyes in closer and you'll see a whole layer of life running around on the sand that you didn't see before. Look even closer and you can see individual grains of sand, water and light dancing between them. Look closer still and you see that each grain of sand is a unique object with its own texture. If your eyes are strong enough, or you have a machine to help you, you can see even more layers by looking closer still. That's what Twitter is going to be like with the launch of Twitter Annotations this Summer. It's a beautiful vision, with huge potential, but there's another way to look at this analogy: you don't build on the beach sand because it shifts too much. Will Annotations live up to its incredible promise? Sponsor What Annotations Are Last week Twitter announced a forthcoming feature called Twitter Annotations: it's a system for almost any metadata to be connected to any Twitter message when it's published. Inside every Tweet is now a space where you could put or find anything, including links out to further instructions or larger bodies of information. That's always been the case with the 140 characters of content - but now we're talking about systematic metadata intended for machines, to augment the content. The idea is dripping with potential, but also some risk. Isn't much of life's meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? Twitter has been considering adding Annotations for at least two years, according to Platform Team member Raffi Krikorian. That's a relatively large portion of the company's young life. Every time a new bit of metadata was added to Tweets, like geolocation information was last Fall, the company would ask itself "should we be doing this, or should we just open up the platform for and and all metadata?" Now the company has decided to do just that. Twitter publishing tools can now add a description to any tweet their users publish, not as a part of the 140 character message, but as a small machine-readable metadata field that travels along with the content. What might this look like? We could see Annotations fields like: Link to a media file, like podcast enclosures, photos linked to, etc. Context about the Tweet like where was the author when it was published, maybe what the weather was like there at the time. Your Twitter publishing interface could offer you a special option to write reviews of movies, books, or links you're sharing. The ISBN of the book, a link to a preview of the movie and the number of stars in your rating could be included in the Tweet Annotations. Any way you can classify, describe, append or otherwise enrich a Tweet with words or numbers can be included in Annotations. You Tweet, you (or more likely your Twitter app) attach a characteristic or quality, you define the characteristic and then you provide a value of how or what that Tweet did relative to the quality being referenced. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and more will make it easy for users to add these annotations. Yes, this is meaningful in large part because of the 140 character limit on Twitter messages themselves, but isn't much of life's meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? From Annotations Come Analysis Annotating a single Tweet is uninteresting, it's when you hit the Twitter databases and gather together all the Tweets that share a characteristic that things get exciting. When those selected Tweets can then be cross-referenced with other sets of data from outside Twitter - that's when the word fecund starts feeling inadequate. Show me all the Tweets from my friends that have links to music and play me those songs. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and others are going to make viewing that kind of data a whole lot easier. Tweetmeme's Nick Halstead believes that Annotations will be used most extensively to communicate webhooks, links to instructions for a Twitter client to follow. He thinks it will enable game play and help Twitter start acquiring more users again. "Because of the size of the data you can put in the annotations, I think people will come up with links to offsite resources. Seesmic is building their own platform for Windows to support plug-ins, but this reaches much further, but this lets Twitter clients augment a tweet with other services. Sf you were Stocktweets, you could attach a link in the namespace that's in stocktweets, Seesmic could follow that link back to Stocktweets and ask it how to render it. So you could put a chart and any other associated information. It's like FBML [Facebook Markup Language], the ability to embed applications inside the Twitter clients. Maybe threaded conversations. A game of Scrabble where the link points at a currently rendered scrabble board, so other people could look at the board and join in playing it. Annotations and webhooks would allow gaming to start happening on Twitter." Halstead believes an Alpha version of Annotations could be made available to developers in a month. How about showing me all the Tweets from anyone that are referencing the President of the United States (subject: POTUS?), analyze the sentiment in the messages, show me where those Twitter users were located and tell me how those local sentiments change over time. Send me an alert when one of those starts to shift radically. Show me all the Tweets by people in their 20's and in their 50's (imagine an author age tag in Annotations, why not?), living near the site of a disastrous event. How do those discussions differ? There are all kinds of interesting questions that could be tackled when the developer world's imagination runs wild on the terms of description applied to our messages. Of course it will be tempting to draw all kinds of conclusions from this rich data. We'll surely be able to draw a whole lot of value from it. "You can learn something from almost anything," Big Data cruncher and 80Legs CEO Shion Deysarkar says. "Just give me enough data, I'll figure out something." But let's keep in mind the words of social network scientist danah boyd, who wrote the following on her blog this morning: Time and time again, I see computational scientists mistake behavioral traces for cultural logic...Big Data creates tremendous opportunities for those who know how to assess the context of the data and ask the right questions into it. But mucking with Big Data alone is not research. And seeing patterns in Big Data is not the same as hypothesis testing. Patterns invite more questions than they answer. Tweet Power Politics Twitter's Krikorian says the site will probably list "trending annotations" just like it lists trending topics today. There will probably be a wiki where anyone can find out what namespaces are being used for what purposes. Really though, the classification system is going to be determined by the market. That's something that worries a lot of people. "People who believe in building standards are conerned about our blase attitude about how we want to run annotations," Krikorian says. He believes that the developer community will work things out for itself, just as it has in the past. "There has been a lot of emergent behavior around how to relate to tweets anyway, without our imposing much structure around it. The Twitter platform is continuously evolving - the developers will figure it out. Twitter developers iterate in public." That's likely to be cold comfort for people focused on the power of structured data standards. Many people are calling for Twitter to embrace the well-built efforts of the Semantic Web community. Krikorian says that 90% of Twitter developers don't know what the Semantic Web is but that there's certainly room for standards lovers to work within the Annotations scheme. It's not just about standards, either. "We need serious consideration from folks who know their stuff before we create a convention," says Teresa Boze , who suggested the American Society of Indexers in particular. It's hard to think that creating a giant living library without consulting some librarians is a good idea. The absence of standard terminology could really be a problem. Annotations can't be changed retroactively, either. Krikorian says that major players will dominate the obvious use cases for Annotations and the company will monitor and highlight really innovative Annotations developed by people on the margins. We'll see how well that will work. Imagination will make the sky the limit for this publishing platform used easily by more than 100 million people around the world. But a shortage of forethought, planning and agreed-upon standards may bring that platform's aspirations back down to earth quickly in the future. Time will tell. Discuss

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What Twitter Annotations Mean