When thinking about formats and design of the new site I started thinking about the Twitter markup characters they use. Due the to the short size of Tweets length becomes important. Because of this they use some single characters to signify special words.

For example, the @ symbol is used to show that a Tweet is directed at a person. @veronica for example shows that your Tweet is directed at Veronica Belmont. The hash symbol (#) is used to signify Tags or important terms in your post. These conventions were not invented by Twitter, but they could still be useful in other situations.