Twitter Annotations

It is easy to get excited by Twitter Annotations as it is an almost blank canvas. So it is fun to imagine what people will build.

But it is not a totally blank canvas and the range of colors and brushes are becoming clearer. So we can start to imagine what will be created with some semblance of reality.

Twitter kick-started the real time web. But Twitter is as far as you can get from the semantic web. It is gloriously, chaotically unstructured.

That is about to change, thanks to Annototions. The rallying cry for the semantic web community is:

“Embed an RDF payload in tweets – now!”

The intersection of real time and semantic is an interesting place to be. Twitter developers will need to explore semantic web concepts rather than waste precious cycle reinventing what already works. On the other hand, semantic web folk will need to figure out how to work within Twitter constraints – bearing in mind that it is constraints that have made Twitter great.

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This Is The Week That Was, Semantically Speaking.

What a week for the semantic web! For a bunch of folks who have been waving the semantic web banner for a looooong time, toiling away quietly in standards committees and suffering the arrows that pioneers get in their backs, this felt like validation time. The big dogs such as Facebook and Twitter are competing for the mindshare of semantic web developers!

Who would have thought that would happen even a few months ago?

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We polled a few experts in the Semantic Web community who have been following the news from Twitter about Annotations and today’s news about semantic markup in Facebook’s OpenGraph.

Here is what they have to say.

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“A week is a long time in politics”, but it is a lot longer in Internet time. Just yesterday we wrote that “Twitter Embraces Semantic Web, What About Facebook?” With F8 underway we knew some big announcements were coming, but we did not think they would have much to do with the Semantic Web. Then I saw this tweet from my friend Alex Iskold (a really talented engineer/entrepreneur who has been using semantic technology in live services for a long time):

“Facebook just nailed Semantic Web.”

That seemed worth checking out. Here is what I found so far.

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