Thanks for your feedback! I totally agree that metadata and its semantics are very important to realize the full potential as a web of activity streams.

Twitter should thus definitely embed more metadata and more structure allowing for powerful applications, especially if their API is becoming a de-facto standard. I mentioned the importance of metadata for Twitter before <a href=” http://www.web2society.com/webtrends/beyond-the...> (April 2009). Others are also concerned about the Twitter API being to limited as a standard for the activity stream web, see here the comment of Sam Sethi. I also added a comment there.

I see many exciting topics to think about related to the web of activity streams and its realization of a synaptic web:
- What could it imply for search, recommendation, etc.?
- How do you best market and get attention in this new structure
- What does it imply for learning, work and collaboration?
- Etc.

When answering these questions, new questions arise on the level of technologies:
- What should a standard API for the web of activity streams be able to do?
- How should semantics facilitate this new web structure and its applications?
- Can we somehow ‘datamine’ this structure (its connection and strengths) and use this information to provide users added value?
This last question relates to the building up attention profiles you mentioned.

I hope to make more time in the near future to dive into the above topics. Carsten Saathoff, who has contributed to this blog, is an expert on web semantics; we have the intention to further dive into the role of semantics in the web of activity streams. If you like you can also be involved!

All best,

Freddy

I really haven't given the Twitter API as-a-standard that much thought, but I can definitely see your point. In fact, two weeks ago I 'extended' the Twitter API as well in a small service I was building.

I would like to quickly throw some extra food for thought in the ring:

- Semantics: Tweets are highly unstructured, and Twitter's API is not doing anything to accommodate more structure, something like Chris Messina's “Atom Activity Extensions” (http://activitystrea.ms) provides a better activity stream structure in terms of semantics (although I don't think it's enough). I think in many ways it's vital for Twitter to start providing some sort of way to embed more structure into its tweets. Or is microsyntax enough?

- Attention Profiles: Routing the right 'activities' to the right neurons is very important, this means that we need much more sophisticated ways of determining the 'strength of a connection'. Perhaps by factoring in 'implicit activity' to strengthen an attention profile.

Thanks for this awesome post!

Dominiek

Thanks for your comments and insights that are contained in them! I agree with you about the Twitter API: it is likely that it will become a defacto standard because the developer base is indeed huge and the threshold is so low: there such a quick win to directly apply this API.

@steveboyd however thinks that an adapted convention is required to make it work for a larger class of social media platforms, see for instance http://bit.ly/4CbytB. I have to dive deeeper in to this though.

“If the ecosystem keeps building up, we'll see huge growth on the client side as well as the upstream application support, meaning that, in the future, any twitter client will let you push content into any publishing platform.” : It will indeed create huge opportunities to create new innovative applications and clients = new business for 3rd parties

“I'm not talking about a bodily sixth-sense but more in a way to gain access to information that you wouldn't otherwise obtain.” I totally agree this is also what I meant in my reply to @steveboyd : http://bit.ly/5DLg5S

I like your idea about “implicit recommendations”, it makes me think of the posts by @deanpomerleau, see for instance http://bit.ly/4QOd7L

By the way, if you haven't converge on a topic for a post on web2society in your comment I easily see multiple topics :) Looking forward to further collaboration!

Cheers,

Freddy