webactions-verbs-research

From IndieWeb

Verbs Research

Research into current real-world usage of verbs for use with webactions (amongst other things). Link or it didnโ€™t happen!

Mark up verbs in prose as bold (three apostrophes) so they can be scanned easily. TODO: make a table/tally of verbs

Attendee Verb Usage

Barnaby Walters is publishing <action> elements for post, reply and bookmark (pic) on his individual note pages (example), falling back to twitterโ€™s tweet, reply and favourite intents if the note was POSSEd to Twitter. (I added a section to my experimental markup document explaining my choice of these verbs --Waterpigs.co.uk 13:27, 4 March 2013 (PST))

Laurent Eschenauer is publishing post verbs on his note lists and individual note pages (example).

Silo Verb Usage

Facebook

Facebook inconsistently use:

  • share,
  • update,
  • post for referring to the same action (of posting a new note to your timeline) and other actions, sometimes all at the same time (pic, docs - note the nav item name on the left contains both post and share).

For comments, both

  • comment and
  • 'write [a comment]' are used (pic, pic) โ€” note inconsistency between 'comment' as the verb and object.

Their ubiquitous

On sites across the web, facebookโ€™s social plugins use yet more verbs:

Flickr

Flickr uses

  • edit
  • delete
  • add [a comment] (pic)
  • favourite
  • add [a tag|a note|a person|etc]
  • view (pic)
  • post [comment] (pic)
  • upload (pic).

Google

Google uses[1]

  • +1 - Google+ branded verb
  • share also often used (pic, pic)
  • post (pic) in their documentation and UI
  • recommend occasionally
  • reply (pic) [2]

Twitter

Twitter uses[3]

  • tweet almost exclusively as their branded โ€œpost new contentโ€ verb
  • retweet as their branded repost-other-content verb
  • compose a lot to refer to the act of writing a tweet
  • reply for tweeting a reply to a tweet.

See Also