Hackers and lovers of hackers, this one’s for you. The beauty of a hack it’s not so new. BUT it is when it enables the bazillions of twitterers without forcing them to code. But then tags are not new so maybe it’s all a load of BS and will disappear tomorrow in a puff.
Over at GigiOm, Liz Gaines has a piece for noobs re how the hashtag became a component of the twitter vernacular after having grown up in the world of IRC.
According to Twitter, 11 percent of tweets now contain hashtags. This is on a platform that sees more than 50 million tweets per day.
Chris Messina (@factoryjoe) called them “channel tags” (as in IRC channel) in the beginning, however the name hashtag became more popular.
Just so you know, a hashtag looks like this: #hashtag
By putting a hash sign in the front of one of the words in your tweet you let others know the category. There can be more than one category. And there is no official dictionary of hastags, so feel free to make up your own.
When someone searches on a term (i.e., antisense) if you tweeted something like “Just read #antisense #mRNAi is major, big pharma #genetics #breakthroughs coming” they more easily find your tweet thanks to you hashtag emphasis.
Moral of the story: Simplicity Rules (kinda like pizza, eh?)
