03 March 2009

What the Hashtag?!

One of the reasons Twitter has taken off and become so popular (at least amongst sad people such as myself with nothing better to do) is that a rich ecosystem has sprung up around it, with all kinds of serious and silly services that build on its content. Here's one of the better ones, What the Hashtag?!:

Welcome to What the Hashtag?!, the user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags found on Twitter

What's a hashtag?

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your posts. Hashtags can be created by anyone simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #myhashtag. Hashtags were developed as a means to create groupings of related content on Twitter.

This is an interesting way to access and index content, and adds an extra level of usefulness to Twitter.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for marking What the Hashtag?! as a useful tool in the Twitter ecosystem. I've got to agree that there are a lot of useLESS tools out there, but myself and the rest of the team behind Microblink decided we wanted to create a tool that would be beneficial to the community and solve a problem. So far, WTH seems to be doing that by helping people understand hashtags and what each of them stand for.

Again, we are honored to have you name as a "good" addition to the ever-growing Twitter ecosystem.

Glyn Moody said...

Good luck with it.

Anonymous said...

Have you checked out @tagalus? http://tagal.us

They have a larger index of tags at this point and all of them have definitions, which it looks like the majority don't on What the Hashtag?

Glyn Moody said...

No I hadn't - thanks for the link.