Viral, Open, and Consumable - Twitter Annotations and the Social API

Another potentially awesome use case involves retweets. Twitter's new retweet system was controversial when it was rolled out because it removed the ability for people to input their own comments on a link they wanted to rewet. The truth is, though, that there was usually a pretty limited space for these comments in the first place. Now, annotations could be used as the main conduit for comments about a particular link. A global, Twitter-wide commenting system could be established if everybody agreed to a standard.

Providing more details about the users posting the tweets would also be quite useful. Imagine if you see an interesting tweet from someone, and embedded in that tweet is also their entire social networking presence and perhaps an extended biography.

The possibilities seem limitless, but as the article mentions there are potential drawbacks. For one, it may take a while to get the big players to agree on standards. Also, the elegance and power of Twitter was the 140 character limit. What happens when a bunch of other garbage starts getting attached to these previously svelte tweets.

Whatever happens it is sure to be interesting, though.