What does # mean in a twitter post? All about octothorpetags.

Twitter needs tags.
Twitter doesn't have tags right now.
It does have names, and if you precede a name by an @, you can follow that name.

Sometimes you want to share a conversation but not create an ID.
For instance, when San Diego was on fire, the tag #sandiegofire was used in Twitters.
That's a hashtag.
No software uses hashtags right now.
But if you are regular about using it in your posts and people catch on, maybe someone will write code.

The use of #hashtags to encode names of channels is shared by IRC.
For instance, Joi Ito is founder and op at #joiito on IRC, according to his LinkedIn.
Channel names live in the same world as hashtags and tags.

If you were to build software to use hashtags, what might it do?

Wiki + hashtags = autolink to a wiki where the name space was tags.
IRC + hashtags = autoconnect to the channel.
Google Search + hashtags = search for the tag.
Google Adwords + hashtags = display relevant ads for that tag.
Flickr + hashtags = display a page with that Flickr tag
LinkedIn + hashtags = search for someone with that tag in their profile.
Facebook + hashtags = search for someone with that tag in their profile.

So, essentially, a hashtag is a search key into a tag space, marked with a #.
Indeed, you can use any search engine that searches Twitter to search for them.
Or, at least, any search engine that doesn't ignore the punctuation.

For more about hash tags, read Chris Messina (factoryjoe).
His Twitter hashtags for emergency coordination and disaster relief describes #sandiegofire.

Chris didn't think much of #arbcamp, but we'll forgive him for that just this once.
And I don't think much of the name hashtag.

I'm going to call them octothorpetags.

Technorati Tags: arbcamp, hashtags, factoryjoe, octothorpetags

Comments

[Sam Jones]

I think tags would also benefit the people who use twitter as a "micro blog" thereby giving them categories for twitters. Maybe hashtags would be global del.icio.us style tags and a slightly extended interface could include the option for single user specific tags.

Or maybe they could be blended together in the twitter itself with the addition of certain characters designating the tag's purpose

(ie. % add to my categories, # add to global categories, etc)

[Chris Messina]

I'm not sure I didn't care for ArbCamp; I just felt that saying that it was a BarCamp wasn't really accurate and lead to false expectations; I'm glad you guys had your event all the same and found a model that worked for you.

As for hashtags, whatever you call them, they serve a useful "meta description" purpose. You should read my original post about them to get more history, but this is a good write up... thanks!

http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/08/25/groups-for-twitter-or-a-proposal-for-twitter-tag-channels/

[Cody Marx Bailey]

I'd like to introduce you to a little tool a buddy of mine (Aaron Farnham) and I have put together called hashtags.org

Should be pretty obvious how it works. If you'd like to get more info, just email me.

-Cody

[Edward Vielmetti]

This is a very popular page on the site, but it needs a lead paragraph that explains it all in one little piece, because the bounce rate for the page is way, way too high. I want to edit it.