what’s the deal with… #hashtags on twitter?

I am starting a new section on my blog, called “what’s the deal with…”. Recently I’ve found a need to preface most of my discussions by setting expectations about semantics. Moving forward, I will be sharing some of my thoughts/opinions/insights on various buzzwords, trends or topics.

Twitter is steadily gaining in popularity, despite its lack of stability. I believe that the simplicity of the service is a major contributing factor to this popularity. As opposed to a closed system that users must use “as it was intended”, twitter has been an easy platform for people to leverage to meet their own needs. I’ve collected a decent amount of links to third party apps that build off twitter. Kathy Gill actually drafted up an interesting article on twitter genres. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to tweet.

In an effort to make the service more powerful, some conventions are being established. Most people recognize “@username” to be a reference to a specific user on twitter (and their name will be linked to their account). Something else users may see are hashes (#) before words. My first exposure to this lead me to hashtags.org (another similar service is twemes). Hashtags.org is an opt-in service. A twitterer can follow @hashtags, and then may use hashtags.org to track realtime tweets that reference that specific hashtags. I’ve seen people throw hashes in front of half of the words in their tweets, to try to leverage this tracking.

Except…

Using hashtags.org requires two things:

1. you must opt-in
2. you only access content prefaced by a hash.

There are plenty of services out there that track all the text within tweets on the public timeline, not just of those who opt in. So if you wanted to know about, say, iCitizen, you could go to http://summize.com/search?q=iCitizen. You get the items prefaced with the hash, as well as without.

So why use hashes at all? For me, it’s a good way to give some context around a tweet. I’ve found it particularly useful for events. When I spoke recently at Spring <br />, I had a few contextual tweets:

Just ran into an old coworker from lexis. He better not heckle! #springbr

@ssaldoff – thanks! they’re recording all the presentations so they’ll be available online later #springbr

The tweets would have felt unnatural had I had to write “just ran into an old coworker from lexis at the spring break conference. he better not heckle” or “they’re recording all the presentations here at the spring break conference so they’ll be available online later”. As well, I would have had to be sure I was referencing the conference the same way every time for it to be easily found. The hashtag offers that context without making the tweet too long.

So that’s the deal on hashtags. Adding additional context to 140 character message..

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