Tag: hashtags

Hashtags For My Followees [en]

[fr] En utilisant un dièze # devant un mot dans un message Twitter, on en fait un tag (un "hashtag", pour être précis -- "hash" étant un nom du dièze). Le site hashtags.org indexe ces tags. Pour y retrouver vos tweets, suivez hashtags sur Twitter.

Hashtags.org popped up on my radar roughly a week ago, I’d say. I mentioned hashtags once already here. They’re a “user-generated” system for implementing tags into Twitter. (User-generated, here, does not mean the same as in the ugly “user-generated content (UCG)” everybody is talking about these days, but points to the fact that hashtags were initiated by users, not by the Twitter-makers — just like the @convention.)

So, what does hashtags.org do? Basically, it makes those hashtags visible. In September, Twitter introduced tracking, which I realise now I haven’t mentioned here yet. Tracking allows you to “subscribe” to keywords. I personally chose to track “stephtara” and “@stephtara” so that any @replies would arrive directly on my phone as texts. I had the bad idea to track “fowa” during the Future of Web Apps conference. By break time I had 300 text messages in my inbox. Oopsie!

Hashtags.org allows you to view tweets labeled with a hashtag on a web page. Look at #leweb3 for example, #twitter, or #wordpress.

A few remarks:

  • it’s not very populated yet, because you need to follow @hashtags for them to track your tags; as of writing, only 132 people are — so start following!
  • I’m getting 500 internal server errors when I try to look at a tag that doesn’t exist (#lausanne, as of writing)
  • once “everybody” starts using hashtags, it will be very useful to be able to narrow down a collection of tagged tweets to “my followees only”; imagine I’m at LeWeb3, and everybody is twittering about it: I’m not interested in getting the thousands of tweets, just those from the people I’m following
  • for a long time, I’ve been a proponent of stickemtogether multi-word tags; recently, I’ve revised my ideas about them and come to realise that multi-word tags really need spaces in them, for better indexing; at the moment, you need to use “+” instead of spaces, like “#san+francisco” (unfortunately these don’t get indexed correctly, another 500 error); Stowe suggests opening and closing hash as an alternative, which is a bit hashy though it has its charm (“#san francisco#”).

In any case, nice to see such an initiative up and running!

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 (via Stowe). 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. It is still not the contact tagging I’ve been asking for — 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!) 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 written in 2005, just after Technorati started indexing tags.