#“What the hell ever happened to Twitter Annotations?”
I got very excited earlier in the year when Twitter announced the Annotations feature. It's a way of adding metadata to a tweet such that it doesn't have to be user-visible. Of course the one use case that many of us thought of was reviews. You could add the rating, url etc as metadata and use the tweet for the summary. Then twitter clients could potentially interpret that and show reviews in Twitter with stars etc.
But that's just one simple use case. Two others I was thinking of over Christmas were filters and hashtags.
I know I know, my Filter Fetish continues unabated. But you could build a really effective filter tool if all of the Apps that posted to Twitter added some Annotations about themselves. So rather than clients trying to figure out that certain tweets are from Foursquare or Mafia Wars, apps would flag this in the attributes and you could mask all tweets from those sources with a single click. Like, cough, Facebook.
Hashtags are a wonderfully useful abomination. Such a simple "feature" provides incredible power for tracking topics but bloody hell, it can make Twitter an unreadable mess at times. Wouldn't it be so much better if hashtags went under the hood? The person or app generating the tweet would add the hashtags in a separate field (like tags in Wordpress) and they would be stored as annotations. Twitter clients could then hide them by default but make them visible if users wanted to see them.
There are so many useful ways Twitter could be improved using Annotations. It was announced at the Chirp Conference in April but is still listed as "not released to production" on the wiki.
So what's the story Twitter? I find it hard to believe it is low priority, given how powerful a feature it could be. It would also allow a lot more normal people to feel ascomfortablewith Twitter as they do with Facebook. Is it proving hard to implement or scale?