Masktags and Multilingual Tweeting
If you speak more than one language and use Twitter internationally, you might have run into some problems. Most importantly, how do you tweet in a language that only some of your followers understand, without annoying everybody else? (See below for the short version.)
There are two common solutions to this. The simplest one is to keep mixing tweets in different languages until everybody who is too annoyed by the gibberish stops following you. Problem solved:
A more sophisticated solution is to create a separate Twitter account for each language that you want to tweet in:
I’ve tried this,
and while it solves the original problem, you get a whole sample pack of new problems in return. Which may be fine, depending on how you use Twitter, and how comfortable you are with Twitter-induced multiple personality disorder. For me, it was too awkward. And besides, I can only make four more psychologist appointments and then my insurance company needs to approve any additional ones.
Since neither solution has worked well for me, I’ve simply kept my public tweets strictly in English:
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Whenever I’ve linked to Swedish content, I’ve made it very clear by sticking “[Swedish]” after the link.
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Whenever I’ve retweeted something in Swedish, I’ve first translated it into English and then used a “TT” prefix, for “translated retweet”. (I still find this useful, by the way.)
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Most importantly, whenever I’ve thought of something myself to say in Swedish, I’ve either found a way to express it in English or else just shut up:
Until now.
The solution
Fast forward about a year, and I’m in Brighton (lovely place, by the way) making breakfast smalltalk with an old lady whose demented tendencies kind of remind me of Twitter-induced multiple personality disorder.
That’s when I suddenly realize how to solve the multilingual tweeting problem without losing half of my followers, without contacting my insurance company, and without lobbying for the addition of any new language features to Twitter itself.
The idea is simple and almost too good to be true. I call it “masktags”. It’s similar to hashtags, only it doesn’t involve a hash, and it masks stuff.
To understand it, you have to remember how @-replies work in Twitter. If you’re following me, and I send an @-reply to someone, it shows up in your timeline, but only if you’re following that other person as well.
That’s the key: This filtering — or masking — aspect of @-replies.
So what about it? Well, I’ve set up an account called @inswe, which I recommend everybody who speaks Swedish to follow. It doesn’t matter whether or not you intend to use this directly: Someone who you follow may use it, and then you’ll miss their tweets unless you follow @inswe.
That point deserves to be made again: If you speak Swedish, then you should follow @inswe, or you will miss stuff if and when someone you follow starts using the “@inswe” masktag. Note that the @inswe account itself will not send out any tweets. It is simply an empty and unused dummy account.
Once a sizable portion of your Swedish followers are following @inswe, you’re all set. Tweeting in Swedish without annoying people is as simple as starting your tweet with the “@inswe” masktag:
It doesn’t get much simpler than this — even in theory!
I’ve just started a Lojban masktag as well: @injbo. If you have this problem but you’re neither a Swede nor a Lojbanist, go ahead and start a masktag for your own language.
Now we just have to come up with masktags for all the other annoying things people talk about on Twitter. Like sports. Or American politics.
