tPoke Twitterformat Proposal

Syntax

@user /action poke|hug|kiss|…<strong>*…*</strong>
<strong>@user /actions</strong>
<strong>@user /poke</strong>
<strong>@user /hug</strong>
<strong>@user /kiss</strong>
<strong>@user /wave</strong>
<strong>@user /wink</strong>
<strong>@user /nudge</strong>
<strong>@user /...</strong>

Summary

The tPoke Twitterformat (e.g., @aral /action throw a llama) brings the wonderful world of Facebook pokes to Twitter. Twitter clients that support tPoke actions could, for example, play a short animation or otherwise present the action to the user in a fun manner. A number of shorthand commands should be created to make authoring by hand easier (e.g., @aral /poke instead of @aral /action poke). MUD-like shorthand to denote actions (text surrounded by asterisks, e.g., @aral Hey there! *wink*) is also supported. The actual vocabulary of supported actions will be determined by individual Twitter client implementors and users may query a client for the list of supported actions (e.g., @aral actions) which will return either a tweet with a list of supported actions or a URL to a web page containing the same list.

Raison d'être

Poking is fun.

Manual usage

The tPoke Twitterformat is simple enough to be authored manually by users. e.g., 

@aral Feel better soon /hug

In MUD-speak, the above would become: 

@aral Feel better soon *hug*

Any action is possible through the generic action tag, even though clients cannot handle all possible custom actions with animations, etc.: 

@aral Catch this! /action throw a llama

You can also query a user's client for a list of supported actions. This will either return a tweet with the list of actions or a tweet with a URL to a page that contains the same list: 

@aral /actions

Implementation guide for Twitter client authors

A. Authoring

No special implementation for authoring is necessary (see Manual Usage, above). However you can make tPoke more visible (and fun) for your users with the following optional implementation:

  1. Display a list of actions that the user can add to her tweet, perhaps using illustrations to make the list more fun

B. Presenting

When a tweet containing a tPoke update is received:

  1. Display action in a fun way in the tweet (e.g., by playing an animation, etc.)

License

This Twitterformat Proposal is released under a Creative Commons Attribution License.