Tantalize me! 
Twitter blog: “Twitter now fully supports microformats.”
You don’t say!
Docs??
Smart Matt
Matt Mullenweg: “There are now hundreds of people making their living using WordPress, and I expect that number to grow to tens of thousands. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.”
Haille Selassie
Posted by brian armitage on May 10, 2007 at 2:28 pm
HIM!
Posted by Tom Morris on May 10, 2007 at 11:39 pm
Dave, the microformats are embedded on to every page – they are some commonly agreed-upon standards that people use with semantic markup to express common chunks of data (eg. people, blog posts, events and so on). You can easily detect them by using the Tails or Operator plugins for Firefox. Twitter are using the hCard microformat to mark-up contacts and the hAtom microformat to mark up individual Twitter messages. The hCard microformat maps on to the vCard standard used by most address book systems, and hAtom is designed to be easily turned in to an Atom 1.0 feed.
The specifications for the two microformats are here:
hCard: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard
hAtom: http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom
You can use a variety of tools listed on those two pages, or the general approach described on the parsing microformats page here: http://microformats.org/wiki/parsing-microformats
From the perspective of a developer, there’s not much reason for you to use the microformats – they provide the same information as the XML feeds and the API, only less of it and slightly harder to parse. That said, if there is a page on Twitter which you are having difficulty replicating the data from via the API, you will now find that there are microformats attached to all the pages, so it may be useful in extracting data from a page that’s not provided via the API. They also make Twitter compatible with tools like Operator and Tails – and with the microformat support that is likely to be built in to Firefox 3.