A big thumbs up to Sarah Perez over at ReadWriteWeb for her excellent post on needing a marketer filter on Twitter. I couldn’t agree more but there’s a couple of things that these marketers, or companies, are doing which is worse than just counting own our gullibility in order to promote their products. After all, as Sarah points out, who wouldn’t want to win a MacBook Pro.

The way they are doing this ‘promotion’ is really just another way to game Twitter, and us, by manipulating what has become an integral part of Twitter – the hashtags. I’ve taken exception before to the abuse of hashtags and how the misuse of them is detrimental to the use of Twitter. By their definition in the Twitter ecosphere hashtags are meant to identify a specific tweet as belonging to a larger conversation on a current ‘hot’ or trending subject.

What this kind of use of hashtags is doing is totally diluting the power of an conversation identification syntax. Regardless of the inane argument that the company isn’t doing anything wrong by getting people to add some specific hashtag li