On the product front, this week was all about annotations, additional metadata (up to 8192 bytes) developers can attach to posts to add content. We always wanted posts to expand beyond 256 characters, and annotations open up the possibilities within a single post. We’d like to see rich media, like photos, videos, long-form content, maps, and games (among many other things), and today, we rolled out an initial annotations implementation.

“Let’s say I’m at a restaurant eating a great dinner, but instead of just telling my followers about this restaurant I want them to be able to see a map of where it is,” writes Mark Thurman, one of our software engineers, on our GitHub API spec. “My Post could include geographic information about the address for the restaurant and then clients that support this geographic annotation could show the restaurant on a map (in addition to showing my post). If the restaurant is on OpenTable, I could include an annotation indicating that and my followers could see the menu and make a reservation in their own App.net client. Annotations are what power complex posts with maps, pictures, videos, etc.”

Needless to say, we’re excited. You can read up on our annotations docs here, and we encourage you to open a GitHub issue if you have feedback. Improvements, tweaks, and enhancements are on their way, but this is a great start.