tantekStevef_ do any of those actually participating in the discussion have a blog themselves, with comments? If they don't, I don't really think much of their opinion of what markup pattern blog comments should have.
tantekbarnabywalters, aaronpk, tommorris, since you guys have thought about (and hacked a bunch?) about coding comments on your own site, and are familiar with microformats2 markup, here's a straw proposal to consider
tantekwhat if we introduced an "h-comment" which is essentially the same as an "h-entry", except that it has a new "u-in-reply-to" property (which does the obvious thing that you guys are already tracking in your blog storage).
Stevef_tantek: btw yes, get your comments about venue etc, when investigating stuff i try to involve people regardless of venue, and encourage particpation
tantekof course, like any microformats property, you could use "u-in-reply-to" on your full fledged posts that you have as well, e.g. your self-hosted @-replies to tweets which you then syndicate to twitter
tantekand on such posts, you could of course combine and have them be both an h-entry and an h-comment - class="h-entry h-comment" --> this is an entry and it's a comment on something else.
tantekbarnabywalters, aaronpk, tommorris - if the real world gut-check of that straw proposal sounds reasonable to you from a self-implementation perspective, I'll take the discussion to #microformats and we can go into details from there
tantektommorris - yes, as implied by the microformats2 "u-*" prefix, the "u-in-reply-to" property would parse looking for URLs per the microformats2 parsing spec.
tantektommorris - I think rel="in-reply-to" would be sufficient, but if we really want to name it properly, the rel value should be a noun naming the thing it's pointing to, relative to the thing it's pointing from
tantektommorris, looks like the POSSEd copy of your posts/8054 : https://twitter.com/tommorris/status/294497028766056448 didn't set the "in-reply-to" field when calling the Twitter API and thus your tweet doesn't show what tweet it is in response to (on Twitter's site).
tantekJust FYI as I thought you said you had this working (I think barnabywalters and aaronpk have their POSSEing of replies working with maintaining such threading on Twitter itself).
tantekthere's been a lot of brainstorming / thinking about comment microformats over the years, and hopefully we've done a decent job of documenting the research
tantek.comedited /Twitter (+3237) "braindump write new section, How to POSSE to Twitter (needs some specific example citations), merge with / make new subsection from Barnaby's on POSSEing notes pseudocode. no longer a stub." (view diff)
tantek.comedited /Twitter (+609) "/* POSSE Notes to Twitter */ add specific permalinks to posts and POSSE tweets to demonstrate examples, note specific CASSIS function to use" (view diff)