Aral Balkan

Those of you that follow my blog may know that I suggested an initiative at the end of last year called Twitterformats – lightweight client-side APIs that extend Twitter to solve practical problems. The idea was to allow anyone the ability to extend the capabilities of Twitter without relying on Twitter on implementing functionality.

(If you need a quick refresher, you can read more about Twitterformats in Jamie Riddell's article on The Next Web: Twitter Formats, a way to truly evolve Twitter.)

Annotations: user-defined metadata

With today's announcement at Chirp that Twitter will be implementing Annotations, Twitter has basically stated that they will be supporting extensible metadata natively as a first-class citizen.

Needless to say, I'm ecstatic at the news.

It means that Twitterformats is no longer necessary and any bits of adopted microsyntax that has value (e.g., /cont) can live on as slashtags.

Make no mistake: annotations are going to be game changing and lead to a host of hitherto unseen Twitter functionality being created by the development community. This is hugely exciting!