The advantages and disadvantages of using Twitter hashtags

Twitter is a free social networking and microblogging service that was originally launched in March 2006 and has since evolved into a real-time short message service that works across multiple networks and devices. Twitter allows users to stay in touch and share information with each other in real time. Users can use a maximum of 140 characters per message or “tweet” as they are called. You can Tweet as little or as often as you like, as long as each individual tweet does not exceed 140 characters.

Once you’ve joined Twitter, you can use its search tool to find people, businesses, and their specific tweets. Hashtags are an effective method that allows users to classify topics into useful categories to revisit later. Hashtags are a community-driven convention for users to provide additional context and other relevant information to their tweets. The basic structure of a hashtag is simple: it is the pound sign (#) followed by an acronym or word.

Twitter did not create hashtags itself; they were borrowed from IRCs (that is, internet relay channels such as chat rooms). Rather, the Twitter community embraced them as a means of creating “bundles” on the service without having to alter the basic service itself.

The Twitter community uses a hashtag in front of frequently used terms to rank them for search and filtering. So when talking about an iPod, for example, people can also refer to “#Apple”. If you are looking for company-specific news that happened recently or what is being said about a company’s product, hashtags can be very helpful.

Using hashtags to search for specific information on Twitter is now even easier since the company purchased the Summize search engine in July 2008. Twitter can now crawl the hashtags themselves at search.twitter.com. The engine also tracks keywords, making hashtags not as necessary for trend tracking as they were in the past. However, they still have unique advantages. For example, you know that anyone who tags their tweet with one of these acronyms means that they will be classified within that topic. It also serves as a visual indicator for others who follow your Twitter stream that they are tweeting on a particular topic.

One of the possible downsides of hashtags is their own popularity. Hashtags are so prevalent on Twitter these days that it can be difficult to keep track of all of them and what they mean. However, there is a resource available that can help with this as well. Tagalus is a service that acts as a hashtag dictionary. Tagalus allows users to vote on tag definitions if there is more than one version. The definition with the most votes will be the one defined by the tag. If you come up with new tags or just want to help build the resource, you can tweet @tagalus to suggest the meaning of a tag. The format to do it is as follows:

@tagalus defines mynewtag as a new tag that describes everything about me

You can also use Tagalus to give an existing label meaning. The format for this is @tagalus define ____ (fill in the tag you want the definition for).