Media AMP Blog

What’s in a tweet? Apparently, a lot more than what meets the eye, once Twitter releases its new “annotations” feature. The target launch date is yet to be announced, but the online community is already abuzz with the feature’s possible applications and its potential impact. Here’s why:

Basically, Twitter annotations will allow “metadata” or additional information — such as keywords, hyperlinks, location/date/time tags, photo/video/audio files, etc. — to be “embedded” in a tweet without affecting its 140-character count. On the surface, most of the metadata would be hidden, but it can systematically be read, aggregated, analyzed and “manipulated” by applications and search engines. And therein lies the potential goldmine — not just for developers working on the apps, but also for businesses primed to take advantage of the possibilities.

On a shallow level: advertising and marketing opportunities

For instance, retailers wanting to launch a new product or promotion could send out a tweet with the product’s specifications, pricing and photograph. Movie tweets could include the movie genre, release date or video trailer. Tweets about a particular restaurant or service could include not just the consumer’s thoughts, but also the establishment’s location, Web site and perhaps even a coupon code. Adding any kind of data to a tweet is possible — so long, of course, as there’s an app for it.

On a deeper level: data analysis and search engine optimization

At its April Chirp conference for developers, Twitter said it now has 105,779,710 registered users with a rate of 300,000 new users signing up daily, that it averages 55 million daily tweets with 60 percent coming from third-party apps, and that it gets 600 million search engine queries per day. While some studies indicate that the actual number of active Twitter users is much less (for example, a 2009 study of 19 million Twitter accounts by security firm Barracuda Labs found only 21 percent were “active” or had at least 10 followers/users they were following/tweets), Twitter activity is nevertheless significant and yields a rich amount of data. The addition of annotations opens up a host of new ways to aggregate and cross-reference this data with other data sets, which can then inform future research, projects and business solutions.

For instance, ReadWriteWeb Co-Editor and Vice President of Content Development Marshall Kirkpatrick envisions monitoring the nation’s political mood by aggregating and analyzing all tweets that reference, say, the “President of the United States,” showing where those tweets originated from, and sending an alert to subscribed users whenever there’s a radical change. That’s just one scenario.  Imagine other possibilities, such as pinpointing the geographical location and preferences of early adopters and trendsetters, measuring which advertising campaigns get the most “traction” and how user sentiments about them change over time, and so on. And because Twitter delivers its data instantaneously, companies could then harness and act on consumer insights in real time, instead of waiting for data to arrive from the field.

Another potential benefit is that the metadata in Twitter annotations could help search engines better understand keywords.  For example, they might differentiate between “apple” the fruit and “Apple” the tech company. Not only could this lead to improved search results, but by including relevant annotations, businesses might be able to increase and optimize traffic to their Web sites.

On an even deeper level still: creative business solutions

Finally, Twitter’s new feature essentially allows developers to create apps that could automate transactions and provide all sorts of business services. For instance, at the Twitter-sponsored 24-hour “Annotations Hackfest” this May, one developer experimenting with the feature came out with the idea of “TweetPlugs,” which employs “plug-ins” (extensions of a software program) to allow users to upload and share files, play games, include polls, and so on. So how about a plug-in for PayPal or a similar payment service? Or perhaps a “loyalty program” app that lets users share a company’s news and promos, tracks whenever they do so, and lets them earn and redeem “rewards”?

As of now, Twitter doesn’t know to what extent companies and developers will use annotations, and indeed, there are still several issues that need to be ironed out.  For instance, how do they standardize the metadata so that it can be understood and acted upon by apps and search engines across the board?  But as Twitter Director of Platform Ryan Sarver tells The New York Times: “The underlying idea is think big, push yourself.” So how will you position your company to take advantage of Twitter’s latest development?