June 9, 2010 – There is a lot of chatter out there about Twitter Annotations and how it will affect Google Wave. Real time annotations are a new type of indexing but it is too early to predict the fallout.

Semantic Web has addressed this very topic several times in the past week in their articles, “Twitter Annotations: At The Intersection Of Real Time & Semantic” and “Will Twitter Annotations Kill Google Wave?”   It is doubtful that Twitter Annotations will actually dismantle Google Wave, but it may certainly have a disruptive impact. But then again Google didn’t make that a difficult task.

For Twitter, structuring something that’s single purest attraction was being unstructured may prove to be more difficult that the developers anticipated. They proclaim the goal of Annotations is to bring more structured data to tweets to allow for better discovery of data and richer interactions.

In the real world, when you set simple but high traffic versus complete but low traffic, the simple but high traffic usually wins. Think printed newspapers.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.