What Do Twitter's Annotations Mean for the Web?

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Rohit Khare, former director of CommerceNet Labs and a key player in the "microformat" community, is also happy to see Twitter experimenting with metadata, but he is concerned about the potential impact. "I think it's important to have standards of some kind, so that services don't start adding things that change the nature of what Twitter is," he says. "For example, you don't want to have tweets where the message can't be understood without seeing the annotations." Khare says he hopes Twitter will have some rules that govern the new feature. "Hopefully they will be there as a backstop and a sponsor and a guardian of these features, but [they] will also allow developers to suggest things."

Hiten Shah, founder of KISSMetrics, says Twitter will have to walk a fine line between telling developers what to do and allowing them to experiment, given some of the tensions between the company and its developer community over the purchase of third-party apps, such as Tweetie, and the introduction of competing features. "They aren't exactly on the good side of developers right now," he says. "I think it's in their interests to put out some best practices and that sort of thing but not to be too heavy-handed about it."

If Twitter can manage to walk that line, Annotations could be a substantial benefit, particularly because Twitter could offer features to advertisers that want to track user behavior and purchasing intent. Khare thinks that while Annotations seem similar to Facebook's open graph protocol, Twitter's variation could actually be more powerful. "Twitter's is wide open, because it isn't tied to any specific activity on any specific Web page," he says. "With Twitter, I can do whatever Twitter or my client allows, whereas with Facebook, I can only do what the publisher of the page allows. Twitter Annotations could actually lead to more open services and clients that have a bunch of different features."

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Disclosure: KISSMetrics is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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