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.

The idea of giving my website a little extra context to the data I am submitted, and having it do interesting and powerful things is a really cool premise for me. For example, I currently have a “Tags” box right above this post I am writing. But as you can tell for my posts I rarely plan out what I am going to say, let alone write a list of keywords that describe the post. So this box is often filled with less than ideal meta data for my post.

It would be very nice to just put a hash tag in front of any terms I feel are important in the post and have the interpretor pull those tags out of the post. The tags could then be displayed differently, either with the hash or without, or a link to that tags filter.

Implementing the @ symbol would be a little more challenging, but would also be very fun. For example, @Slashdot could automatically pull a link to Slashdot.org from an internal lookup table. It could even try to determine the best kind of link. When using @veronica the interpretor could figure out that I mean veronica @ twitter.com.

Figuring out how to do all that if for another day, I am just mulling over ideas and flushing they out a little.