Hashtags in Twitter

Something about hashtags in Twitter

Question: when Twittering, I often see these words with a hash in front of them in other peoples tweets. What’s this all about?

Answer: these are called hashtags in Twitter. Since Twitter does not provide any means to categorize or group the tweets, the twittercommunity started making use of hashtags to group tweets.

A hashtag in twitter is simply a keyword or abbreviation, preceeded by a hash (or pound sign: #), for instance #icantinternet could be used for all tweets about this blog. Or #bushfire can be used to group all tweets about the Australian bushfires. Something that could never be done without the hashtags.

So how can you find all those tweets then?

Easy, take a look at http://search.twitter.com, and search for the hashtag of your choice. Thanks to the enormous popularity of Twitter, there are also numerous apps out there on the internet that help you with the use of hashtags, such as http://hashtags.org

You can follow me on twitter via http://twitter.com/icantinternet

And this time, if you see Hashtags in Twitter in your timeline you know what they are 😉