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 didn’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 twitter’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) — note inconsistency between 'comment' as the verb and object.

Their ubiquitous

On sites across the web, facebook’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 “post new content” 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