Ben Clemens
Make it easier to parse rating information in tweets by enclosing in parentheses & using either a * (****) or number scheme (4/5).
The premise of Rating syntax is that users want to be able to tweet ratings for the benefit of others. This happens all the time in informal ways, but if appliances are to parse this from the Twitter (or other) real time stream, it is significantly and less error-prone if a more formal syntax is used.
In tweets, ratings about a product or business fits the short nature of the medium. The use of stars is already a fairly natural part of writing out that information, and the convention of ratings for restaurants and wines includes x/x ("5 out of 7"). In combination with a URL, could be parsed to add rating metadata to another object. Ratings could be used to:
Rate experiences with a restaurant on a site like yelp just by tweeting the yelp url and a rating
Rate the movie you just saw in a format that can be aggregated to show a real-time collective judgement on the film
This syntax would formalize that usage, and require it for parsing a rating as microsyntax. Specifically, rating information would require two parts: