The tight 140 character contraint imposed by Twitter imposes an economy of style that has proved a strong stimulus to abbreviation conventions. The most successful, of course, has been the @ reply, so much so that many people assume that Twitter invented it themselves, when it was in fact invented by users and then officially adopted. The hashtag (#) ranks next in importance, but after than the conventions quickly become less universal. Even the venerable "RT" for re-tweets has been the subject of some controversy.

One intriguing development has been an attempt to develop an "official" Twitter abbreviation syntax. The result is called "nanoformats", since it comes with the imprimateur of microformat.org but is even shorter. It does seem horribly ambitious to make anything official, unless you own Twitter and it's all a bit too ugly for me with its heavy use of colons. But I wish them luck.

In the meantime, I've been using a different set of conventions that I first came across last year in a blog post by Chris Messina. Chris is more modest than the nanoformat crew and explains his reason for writing up the syntax quite simply:

Well, I never expect that anyone will follow my lead, but if they do, I’d like to spell out what I’m doing so they can more or less get it right.

I thought I'd give them ago and they've stuck with me. I like them, so here they are in case you've ever wondered what I mean by them:

/via

This is used after quoting someone (usually on twitter, but not necessarily). Rather than reviving the RT versus via controversy linked to above, I use this alongside RT. I will only use RT for a full and exact quote, but allow minor editorial liberties (e.g. correcting spelling or ... elision) and maybe some additional commentary with a /via. Here's an example:

Might take a look at this: Complete first chapter of my new book Web Analytics 2.0 is here: http://zqi.me/8YmTeI /via @avinashkaushik

(here's the original tweet).

/cc

These days the "@ reply" has morphed into the "@ mention" and it is very handy for getting a few people to see a tweet. The /cc tag is used if you are replying to one person but want to copy some others in too.

@engin_eer Waleed Ali is quite good, but with Miranda and Peter, it won't be much fun. #qanda /cc @franksting

/by

When linking to an article or post by someone, this is a handy way to attribute it.

"Mule Stable demo video" http://bit.ly/bZVIOF /by @stubbornmule

Of course, there are plenty of other ways to do this and some are even very similar (e.g. cc/ instead of /cc), but these work for me.

I should add that I called this post "Microformats for Microblogs" because I'm using the same conventions on identi.ca and, of course, the Mule Stable.