#tweetsmart

Chapter 3. Hashtag Games

Tweet this Project

Twitter uses a system of hashtags to organize the millions of conversations that are all happening simultaneously. A hashtag is a keyword or phrase preceded by the pound sign: #.

Twitter’s system of hashtags is an organic creation—invented not by Twitter, but by Twitter-user Chris Messina in August of 2007—to help users organize their conversations around topic areas. There is no hashtag registration process. There is no monitoring service. People create and insert hashtags into their messages as they please for a number of different reasons.

If you’ve spent any time on Twitter, you’ve no doubt seen them in the wild already. People sometimes append them to their messages to indicate the type of message.

“President signs historic bill into law. #breaking #news”

Or, sometimes people work the hashtag into the text of their message:

“OMG I think an #earthquake just rumbled through town.”

Either way, the authors of these messages are using hashtags to ensure that their messages show up in a larger stream of messages devoted to the topic represented by each included hashtag.

When readers of Twitter messages care to peek in on what people are currently saying on any given topic, they can simply run a search for a particular hashtag. Searching for #earthquake, for example, will alert the reader instantly to reactions from people about any seismic activity around the globe. A search for #breaking will produce a stream of messages from people discussing ...