Twitter is a social networking site where users create profiles, follow others, and communicate through 140-character tweets. Hashtags are used to categorize posts and track trends. They can be used for conversations, events, or to highlight specific topics. Hashtags.org is a website that tracks Twitter trends.
Twitter® is a social networking website on which people create profiles, “follow” or “unfollow” others, and communicate in posts of 140 characters or less, called tweets. In addition to communicating with friends through universal posts, @posts directed to specific people, and private posts—called direct posts—Twitter® users have also used Twitter® posts to follow comments on particular topics and to have international conversations among multiple people . Because the posts are so short and there are so many tweets, the use of the hashtag, a name for the # symbol, was developed by the Twitter® community. The hashtag is used in several ways.
The use of flagged hashtags developed in 2007, when a user named Nate Ritter identified his San Diego bushfire updates with a hashtag at the top of his posts:
#sandiegofire
Like in this example, it’s normal to have no spaces in a hashtag and run multiple words together. You can use more than one hashtag, but they are separated by a space. While Ritter used to place hashtags at the beginning of his posts, it’s now semi-conventional to place any hashtags at the end of a tweet.
A variety of facilities, both on the Twitter® site and in applications created to enhance the posting and viewing experience, allow for searches, and users can search for hashtags. This has led to the development of some uses of hashtags. For example, hashtag is an efficient way to categorize a post that may not contain the word category. For example, a post about a new device or gadget might be flagged:
# Technology
This would allow people generally interested in the tech, but not yet aware of the new device by name, to find the post.
Hashtags are also used to highlight posts written by people who are in a conversation. Some conversations take place at a particular time each week, others are ongoing. The hashtag:
#musedchat o #MusEdChat
is used by music educators who meet to chat on Mondays, but also post in between.
Hashtags.org is a website that evolved to track Twitter® trends and encourage recognition by promoting the use of hashtags to categorize posts. At one time, it also allowed users to sign up for a profile and apply three hashtags to their Twitter® ID names, in order to help like-minded people find each other. In 2010, it was essentially offline for a few months and being retooled, but planning a comeback with new features.
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