webactions-verbs-research

= 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  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).

Facebook
Facebook inconsistently use: For comments, both Their ubiquitous
 * 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).
 * comment and
 * 'write [a comment]' are used (pic, pic) — note inconsistency between 'comment' as the verb and object.
 * like is not as branded as 'tweet', but nevertheless commonly associated with facebook (google search for 'like').

On sites across the web, facebook’s social plugins use yet more verbs:
 * share (pic)
 * send (pic, docs)
 * follow (docs)
 * recommend (pic, docs).

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 - Google+ branded verb
 * share also often used (pic, pic)
 * post (pic) in their documentation and UI
 * recommend occasionally
 * reply (pic)

Twitter
Twitter uses
 * 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.