o I'd also like us to nail down the at least the basic set of special characters and commands that can be embedded into messages.

o We use @username to make sure a user sees a message (subject to access rules and depending on what timeline he/she's viewing).

o We also use #tagname to mark embedded tags.

o It also occurs to me that we could use $servicename to direct a message to a service (a machine that will respond to our message)...

[Daniel] Depends on whether we want to handle bots different from users, otherwise we could call bots also via @ 

o Twitter has a number of letter commands, such as "d" at the beginning of a message to make it private. I remember seeing a long list of special commands recognized by Twitter, but they seemed: (a) fragile, and (b) hard to extend the command set.

o I wonder about a command language with a syntax like "p: @fred @joe here's my message" to cause a private message to be sent to only fred and joe?  Does anyone have a handle on the set of commands we envision for our command-line language?