socialmedian: What Does that Hashtag Mean? New Service Tells You

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What Does that Hashtag Mean? New Service Tells You

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Mar 20, 2009

Summary

So you've joined Twitter and have finally started to get the hang of things. You know to put an "@" sign in front of usernames for public replies and you know how to send private messages with a "d." You filled out your profile and have mastered the art of TinyURLs. You even found some interesting people to follow and have started conversations with them. There's just one thing holding you back from complete Twittervana: those odd-looking abbreviations in people's tweets preceded by the pound sign (#). Congratulations, you've stumbled upon the Twitter hashtag, a tracking tool for Twitter topics. But what do they mean?

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If you're a pro Twitterer, skip ahead to details about the new hashtag resource.

About Hashtags

Hashtags in Twitter are a community-driven convention for adding metadata to your tweets. They were originally developed to create groups on Twitter for tracking a topic. Initially, they only worked in combination with a service from hashtags.org which provides real-time hashtag tracking. All you had to do was opt-in by following Twitter user @ha

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Comments (1)

Velociped,

Mar 21, 2009

There are some problems with this service as it presently exists. A major one is that it returns hits for all tweets containing the acronym or abbreviation sought - regardless of whether it is a hashtag or not. Nevertheless, it has potential. I hope they can tweak it as a more useful tool.