Back when I was developing a Twitter client I remember when the idea of hashtags first came up as an idea. As a user I could see the value of something like hashtags because it did solve a problem of being able to track a large conversation. Both Chris Messina and Stowe Boyd were the main movers behind the idea and it took off pretty quick.

Over the last period of time since the idea of hashtags were introduced I have seen them used for the intended purpose and do a great job; but I have also seen them become nothing more than overused crap. At what point does a Twitter message that is made up of more hashtags than actual message stop being useful?

Now though Stowe Boyd is suggesting that we include more in tweet meta information by using /’s to indication location e.g.: /Ontario. Added to this idea is a suggestion for expanded location information by closing the location data of multiple words with another / e.g.: /Ontario Canada/.

All this on top of the retweeting idea and the @ replies nomenclature. Into this mix Stowe now has started a specific site to deal with trying to come up with some sort of microsyntax standards – except they won’t be standards.

Already Twitter messages are being overrun by things like hashtags and RT’s (signifies a ReTweet) to the point that there is more meta than message. Now we want to stuff even more crap into a Twitter message making it even more useless for its original intention – to send a simple 140 character (or less) message.

The simplicity of Twitter and its method of communicating is slowly being destroyed by people trying to make the service into something it was never intended to be – an Instant Messenger. I also have to side with Ralf Rottman from TheNextWeb.com when he says

Don’t make me think

I could not say it any better as Steve Krug did in his bestselling book Don’t Make Me Think: “The book’s premise is that a good program or web site should let users accomplish their intended tasks as easily and directly as possible” (Source: Wikipedia). For the geeks amongst us adding special chars to our short message might feel natural. My mother, however, does not at all understand anything about the semantic web and a growing demand for identifying relationships in unstructured data. (And yes, she tweets, too!) The task of identifying meta information such as places and keywords should be implemented in a way that does not make the average user think. We’ve already solved this for spell checking, so why don’t we give it a try here?

You know Facebook isn’t going to kill Twitter. Neither is Friendfeed. The only thing that could mortally wound our favorite blue bird of messaging is people who want to keep cramming more and more crap into 140 characters.

Enough already.