Introduction

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 post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.

Hashtags were developed as a means to create "groupings" on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. The hash symbol is a convention borrowed primarily from IRC channels, and later from Jaiku's channels.

Using hashtags

Hashtags were popularized during the San Diego forest fires in 2007 when Nate Ritter used the hashtag "#sandiegofire" to identify his updates related to the disaster.

Chris Messina wrote up this use in his post on Twitter hashtags for emergency coordination and disaster relief.

Subsequent uses have emerged, especially alongside Twitter's track feature and the development of hashtags.org, which shows useful graphs of popularity and recency of hashtags. Another useful tool is the Terraminds twitter search engine that allows for searching for arbitrary hashtags: search for #hashtag

Suggestions and tips

The use of hashtags is still an emergent phenomena, and as such, etiquette is negotiable, though some have already expressed their distaste for hashtags.

Used sparingly and respectfully, hashtags can provide useful context and cues for recall, as well as increased utility for the track feature. Used excessively can cause annoyance, confusion or frustration, and may lead people to stop following you. It's best to use hashtags explicitly when they're going to add value, rather than on every word in an update.

A good rule of thumb to follow is to focus on your update first, and only if it quantitatively adds value, to append one-three hashtags. There are no hard and fast rules, but Twitter should continue to be about answering the simple question: "What are you doing" rather than "What tags apply to what you're doing?"

Example uses

  • Events or conferences, e.g.: "Tara's presentation on communities was great! #barcampblock"
  • Disasters: "#sandiegofire A shelter has opened up downtown for fire refugees."
  • Memes: "My #themeword for 2008 is conduct."
  • Context: "I can't believe anyone would design software like this! #microsoftoffice"
  • Recall: "Buy some toilet paper. #todo"

Further reading

(In rough chronological order)

Known issues

Obviously the hash symbol has other uses, notably for denoting indices ("I'm #1!") or phone numbers ("Dude, what's your #?"). It's hard to avoid these kinds of collisions and are simply something to consider modifying a common communication channel.

Hashtags users

Hashtags are admittedly an early-adopter feature, but have been picked up by a number of folks. If you see folks making regular use of hashtags, feel free to point them out here:

Technical Documentation

Text Parsed
#downtown #downtown
#downtown? #downtown
#downtown. #downtown
#downtown] #downtown
#downtown} #downtown
#downtown) #downtown
#downtown, #downtown
#downtown; #downtown
#downtown' #downtown
#downtown's #downtown

Text Parsed
#downtown_ #downtown_
#down+town #down+town
#down_town #down_town
#down-town #down-town

Text Parsed
#www.downtown.com #www.downtown.com
#www.downtown.com. #www.downtown.com

Text Parsed
##
#.


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  • Recent comments:
    Ontario Emperor:Regarding the list of references down toward the end of the page - would there be any objection if we added parenthetical statements after the author's name, containing a brief summary of the content of the link? (e.g. the Nate Ritter link could have the statement "(account of tweeting #sandiegofire information)"
    Chris Messina:Read this: http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/ 12/23/making-the-most-of-hashtags
    David Hogg:What's the difference between hashtags and track?
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