Aaron Parecki

@tantek has been using his Falcon project to create short-form and long-form content on his site, and syndicate it out to Twitter. Falcon is a personal publishing (tweeting, blogging, realtime syndicating) web application created in the true spirit of the Indie Web.

When syndicating content to other sites, a good practice is to include a link back to the original content. This has the effect of letting people know that this copy is not the original, and lets them find the original if they want to cite or link to it.

Unfortunately, Twitter has no mechanism for including this "citation" link anywhere except in the text of the tweet itself. This means if you're syndicating content to Twitter and want to include a link back, the link will become part of the tweet. This ends up looking something like this:

Now I don't know about you, but when I see a link in an interesting tweet, I am inclined to click it. The problem with these links is that they often link back to tantek.com which has an exact copy of the tweet text and no additional content. I often find myself disappointed after clicking, because I was expecting to see more. Sometimes, @tantek's tweets are in fact cut short and do link to more content, such as in this example.

After hearing this feedback from a couple people, Tantek realized he needed a solution to indicate whether there is additional content available when following the link. He proposed this format:

So far this has been working great. Now, tweets with no additional content look like this:

while tweets with additional content include the "http://" prefix.

I think another great convention would be to use a colon to indicate additional content. It's a natural indicator of "more" and generally draws interest to the thing following the colon.

Would you be more likely to click this link aaron.pk/2DS or this link: aaron.pk/2DS?

Tantek has already used this convention, possibly without realizing it, as observed in this tweet:

So what do you think? Should this be the convention for syndicating content?

No content other than this text (ttk.me/t4B12)

There is some more content available here: ttk.me/t4B13

If you are interested in this topic, you might also be interested in attending IndieWebCamp in Portland, Oregon in June, 2011.