Author(s):
Barrett Cunningham
In 140 characters:
Impression tags would be a way to relay our impression of a link or a topic in a machine readable fashion that allows for collation.
Description:
We use tags now to tell others what the topic of our tweet is using the # symbol. This has proved helpful for many reasons from collation to search. However, there is no real equivalent when trying to relaying our impression of something. By using the * symbol in front of any impression, appliances would be able to collate impressions of any link in order to provide other users a better understanding of what they are likely to find at that link before clicking on it.
Details and Use Cases:
For instance if I found a link to a new Apple laptop that I thought was cool or interesting, then I could use those words in my tweet and add a * in front of each one. If several people did this then a service like Bit.ly could collate that information and then provide a list of popular links with the top three impressions of each one. Also, visitors to bit.ly could just click on a certain impression, such as *funny, and see the top links tagged with that impression. Lastly, these tags could be treated as a type of "remember" button that you could refer back to later. If you wanted to see all the links that you thought were *inspiring or *unbelievable, you could do that.
This is very similar in concept to Digg or the "like" button on Facebook except it allows for a much more open and organic way of tracking impressions.
Examples:
"http://bit.ly/5QDBM The Future iPhone. Very *cool stuff!"
On bit.ly this link could show up as something like this:
Next in your iPhone OS
Top Impressions:
cool (72), smart (31), wantit (18)
"http://bit.ly/13pHxH Seth Godin's blog. An *inspiring blog about business."
On bit.ly this link could show up as something like this:
Seth's Blog
Top Impressions:
inspiring (312), interesting (218), helpful (98)
This could also be used on retweets to tell others what you thought of their tweet or even to help find breaking news:
"RT @JohnSmith: We just had an earhquake in Santa Clara, pretty rough. *breaking"
Comments (1)
Ben Clemens said
at 9:42 pm on Jul 16, 2009
I <3 this, it builds twistory right in!
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