14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter’s success has come from its simplicity and relative freedom. Users have been very creative when it comes to the service and have been coming up with their own ways to deal with the imposed limit of 140 characters. For example, the use of '@' when a message was destined for another user started out as a convention and was only later adopted by Twitter as a feature.
But most of its drawbacks come from the very same simplicity and freedom. With users coming up with new microsyntax, conventions and interpretations of those conventions every day, it’s easy to get lost in the jargon if you aren't an avid Twitter user. It’s also easy to have two conventions for the same thing. Fortunately Microsyntax.org was set up to change all that.
Stowe Boyd, the creator of Microsyntax.org, wants to have a unified body watching over the community issuing guidelines and helping them get behind just one of those conventions. Twitter's response to these problems is to ignore them so in effect there was a need for a 'standards body'. Microsyntax.org doesn't want to become one but it may have to if no one else will.
“[...] we are launching a new non-profit, Microsyntax.org, with the purpose of investigating the various ways that individuals and tool vendors are trying to innovate around this sort of microsyntax, trying to define reference use cases that illuminate the ways they may be used or interpreted,” Stowe wrote in a blog post.
There are a number of microsyntax conventions in use that are very well established, like 'RT' if you are retweeting someone else's message. Hashtags, using # in front of specific topics, are also very popular and are helpful for users searching for a particular piece of information. The diversity of microsyntax tends to be somewhat confusing to average users but if it becomes popular enough it may be adopted by Twitter and integrated into the service although this has been a very slow process so far.