Tag: metadata

Twitter Hashtags: A Quickie [en]

[fr] On commence à ajouter des tags aux messages Twitter. Comme la place est limitée, le tag est souvent incorporé au message. Attention donc à ne pas sortir les tags du message lors de l'implémentation de cette fonctionnalité dans vos outils.

Steven Hodson has [questions about hashtags in Twitter](http://www.winextra.com/2007/09/02/a-question-for-twitter-users-out-there/) ([via Stowe](http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2007/09/steve-hodson-wo.html)). He also talks of possible support for these in TwitBox:

> And yes I am asking this for some purely selfish reasons as I am thinking about adding experimental support for this idea to TwitBox so I would definitely be interested in some feedback on this.

Steven Hodson, A question for Twitter users out there

(For reference, [hashtags is a proposal for Twitter tag channels by Chris Messina](http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/08/25/groups-for-twitter-or-a-proposal-for-twitter-tag-channels/). It is *still not* the [contact tagging I’ve been asking for](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2007/05/04/groups-groupings-and-taming-my-buddy-list-and-twitter/) — but I hear the Twitter boys are working on that.)

A quickie, that I’ve been thinking about: as space is limited in twitter messages, I’ve noticed a tendency to just insert a hash in the message in front of a relevant word, if the tag one wanted to use was already part of the message. Example:

> Writing a message about using #hashtags on #twitter. #tagging

In this case, I saved space by using the hash inside my sentence, and not repeating the tags “hashtags” and “twitter” alongside “tagging”.

So one important thing would be to not remove the tag from the message when putting it in a channel. Otherwise we could end up with things like this in the channel #twitter:

> Writing a message about using on. (tags: hashtags, twitter, tagging)

See how bad this would be?

Incorporating metadata in the message “body” itself is nothing really new ([microformats](http://microformats.org)!) but here there is an extra incentive to do it: space is limited. Keep that in mind when implementing hashtags for Twitter or other presence tools.

**Update:** Old, but still relevant. Some [thoughts about tagging, tags, and tag combinations](http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2005/01/16/thinking-about-tags/) written in 2005, just after Technorati started indexing tags.

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