DISQUS

alex · 8 months ago

I would consider the @ in twitter superior to any kind of interface solution trying to achieve the same. It is like a shorthand for something that would be very clumsy to put in natural language. Making functionality part of the language and as such easy to parse is not a a bad thing. Neither is it automatically good - but here it really works.

Also worth noting are clever things like the new gmail search (via the lab) that suggest rather clever search strings based on your clumsy human attempts to control the beast.

And as for hashtags - twitter search is now so powerful that most things that warrant a # work just fine without.

All in due time :)

atomless · 8 months ago

Spontaneous adaption, evolving new behaviours and constructing new meanings from new symbols seem to me to be distinctly human activities. Not at all machine like. Rather than being evidence of some kind of regressive mechanization of humanity by and for the machines this simply appears to be further proof of human adaptability and inginuity. Traits beyond the reach of any near future machine.

That said, perhaps Twitter could do away with the symbols with a little help from http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Christian (Simply X) · 8 months ago

Error...Does not compute.

Len Kendall · 8 months ago

Perhaps the reality of the situation is that as humans "evolve" they will move closer and closer to being integrated with machines. Thus the people being trained in that thought pattern now will be more advanced?

Not advocating this as a good thing, just simply stating it is very possible. It's much easier to train a human to be more machine like than the other way around.

Rob Record · 8 months ago

Due to 140 character limit on Twitter, it saves space to be able to tell people what subjects your link/tweet refers to with #tags.

mathewballard · 8 months ago

I can see it being a deterrent for those who don't speak the "language". But, I have never thought of it as a problem for myself.

Kris · 8 months ago

Good point.

On the other hand, there are already some great improvements in human computer interaction, like the verbs being used in Mozilla's Ubiquity for instance.

Nonetheless, we are still far from finished.

marshal sandler · 8 months ago

My Education was in the Liberal Arts Semantic's General Semantics Mathematics and Reading of the Great Books and we studied Latin and Spanish and after School attended Hebrew School to prepare for a Bar Mitzvah there is no way communicating with a machine is anything more than taking swimming lesson's from a drowning man-Louis Gray communicates I defy you to convert his or Seth Godin's thought into 140 characters we the unwashed need a headline a deck and relevant content-I wish you all the best in your attempts to monetize 140 characters-The Fault in an engineering education is when looking to solve a problem they try to invent a machine instead of first looking to nature for an answer-I added BlogRollr to my site as a test 4 weeks after I wrote them with a question-did you get an answer not Me but then my question was over 140 characters Only Lijit Adaptive Blue and Tumblr will get back to you the rest are busy eating Bytes and Bits at Starbucks this is all Semantic Jazz-I may be a little off topic but don't add machine language to The Mortal Coil-Mortal coil is a poetic term that means the troubles of daily life and the strife and suffering of the world. It is used in the sense of a burden to be carried or abandoned, most famously in the phrase "shuffle[d] off this mortal coil" from Shakespeare's Hamlet. (For more context of the phrase, see To be, or not to be.)
Reply in Machine Language please HEH
heh 221 up, 79 down
Coversational putty, used mainly on IRC to smoothen the flow of chat. Can be used to acknowledge another person's speech, while not actually responding to it. Can also be used as an equivalent of throat-clearing, indicating that you have something to say which will follow afterward.

sgreenblatt · 8 months ago

I agree, to some extent. The @ and # notations could be a deterrent at first to non-computer-savvy users, but the natural language equivalent, something like "To: Louis re: DISQUS," is a kind of clunky for the seasoned user. Why not have both styles as options? Then, new users could use a notation that they are used to in business letters. Once they get sufficiently irritated by the verbosity, they can switch over to the current notation.

If you want the subject of the tweet to be automatically inferred by Twitter, then we would probably need to help it along. Again, provide options. Users comfortable with # notation and want to make absolutely sure that Twitter gets the subject right, use the # notation. Users who want the system to infer the subject do not use # notation, and take their chances. Over time (probably a very short time, due to volume of tweets) Twitter learns what a tweet about a particular subject looks like, taking into account all available information. The tweeters that take their chances with natural language would get better and better results as more tweets come in, and everybody is happy.

The changes necessary to implement this sort of behavior are not trivial, but they are not insurmountable either. It all comes down to how much Twitter wants to capture these potential non-computer-savvy users.

VlogHog · 8 months ago

20 years? Many companies will follow the Google search index model and adapt or die.

richy rocks · 7 months ago

'u' is easier to write than 'you', and it's wasted energy fighting to save the ' y ' and the 'o'. you're fighting the practicality preferred by millions of texters, emailers, chatters and social networkers around the globe. however it's valid and necessary to check our humanity occasionally in relation to the tools we use (including language) to ensure that the tools are serving us and not the opposite. to be continued.....