How a Wildfire Helped Spread the Hashtag

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

How a Wildfire Helped Spread the Hashtag

Posted by Soulskill on Monday December 22, 2014 @10:10PM from the #iseewhatyoudidthere dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Chris Messina is credited with originating the use of hashtags at Twitter. What's not widely known is the role of San Diego's wildfires in making hashtags reach a tipping point. Messina, who was Twitter user 1,186, says in the fall of 2007, Web developer Nate Ritter started posting updates on the firestorms using the hashtag #sandiegofire. Other users, including the news media, glommed onto the handle and citizen journalism took a big step forward. From there, other world events and use cases (e.g., Instagram) would lead Twitter to make hashtags more searchable.

36 comments

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Boo hashtag! by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-22 22:41 · Score: 2, Interesting

Hashtags are polluting search results when it comes to IRC channels.
Did you say hashtag? by Trogre · 2014-12-22 22:43 · Score: 2

Wait, do Americans actually call it a hashtag and not poundtag (or if close to Redmond, a sharptag)? Have they finally left that #=pound silliness behind?
#hopeyetforhumanity

--
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
1. Re:Did you say hashtag? by CastrTroy · 2014-12-22 23:49 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Why not an octothorpetag.
  
  --
  
  Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
2. Re:Did you say hashtag? by loufoque · 2014-12-23 00:56 · Score: 2
  
  It's only 'pound' in a DTMF context.
3. Re:Did you say hashtag? by omnichad · 2014-12-23 07:55 · Score: 1
  
  Or as shorthand for weight measurements
Welcome to the late 80s by poptix · 2014-12-22 23:00 · Score: 4, Informative

We were using it for IRC way back then, they're called channels.
What was old is new again.

--
Just because you disagree doesn't mean it's not true.
1. Re:Welcome to the late 80s by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2014-12-23 00:12 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Shhh. Don't let the secret out. Our entire 'digital economy' consists of re-implementing concepts from 1975-1995(approximately) either on mobile phones, in HTML/JS, or both, and then snorting the VC money. We can't let them know that.
2. Re:Welcome to the late 80s by Darinbob · 2014-12-23 07:43 · Score: 1
  
  The story feels strainge in other ways. For example, wouldn't Twitter have to add the hashtag feature before a customer could "originate the use"? Or maybe this is a Twitter thing, such that only things invented at Twitter are acknowledged to exist.
  (I've never used twitter, it seems clumsy, uninformative, and does nothing that no other service can do better.)
3. Re:Welcome to the late 80s by Darinbob · 2014-12-23 07:44 · Score: 1
  
  It's ok, VC people don't read Slashdot and wouldn't understand it if they accidentally stumbled across it.
No by Threni · 2014-12-22 23:01 · Score: 1

They were already in use. Any subsequent use would help increase their usage, obviously. If not this then something else. There's nothing notable about this case.
Metadata by koekepeer · 2014-12-22 23:02 · Score: 1

Something I never understood is why the hashtags need to count towards the 140 character limit - IMO they should be parsed out and stored as post metadata
1. Re:Metadata by Tom · 2014-12-22 23:22 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Because they are a hack. Twitter wasn't designed to include any metadata except author, date, etc. - certainly not topics, tags or keywords.
  The problem is feature creep. Of course users want tags and keywords and topics and threading and circles and access levels/restrictions and grouping and two hundred other features. But if you give them what they want, they will complain that it's all too complicated and move elsewhere.
  
  --
  Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
2. Re:Metadata by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2014-12-23 00:23 · Score: 2
  
  I suspect that it's a combination of two things: In Ye Distante Past, the 140 character limit was hard and fast because SMS is inflexible like that. Since that time, any SMS-related limitations have become somewhere between effectively obsolete and laughably irrelevant; but (given the absolute profusion of make-noise-on-the-internet services with which they compete) Twitter is loath to do anything that makes them less distinctive, and their somewhat tenuous claim to survivability, much less value, that much less evident.
  
  Had twitter been designed from the ground up as a fully capable platform; but with a 'brevity is the soul of wit' house rule, it might well be as you suggest(at least until some agonizing trend of using metadata stuffing to produce paragraph-length word soup tweets hit the system); but it wasn't. It was designed as just plain less capable, to interact with a just plain less capable technology, and has since had surprisingly good luck with how much people like the (now architecturally irrelevant) limits.
3. Re:Metadata by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2014-12-23 00:24 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Man, you geeks are always making this difficult. Just solve it the easy way: Don't give all the users all the features they want, that would confuse them(as you said). Just give all the users all the features that I want. Much less confusing, and I'm happy!
4. Re:Metadata by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-23 01:17 · Score: 0
  
  The limit to SMS messages is 160 "characters", this being GSM and therefore using its very own character set. It's also piggy-backed on the control network so while arbitrary there's at least some technical rationale, though it has little to do with servicing the end-user.
  The twitter limit though is completely arbitrary. It's also regularly subverted by entire columns of text shared as a picture. This is actually regressive as it takes more data to send and so is less efficient*, and also less accessble. You can "hashtag" all you want but at the end of the day you now need an OCR thing to make the archives searchable. Not that you'd want to, for the banter is only rarely witty in retrospect.
  On a curious tangent, I now regularly get SMS-messages in multiple-linked packs where the total content doesn't exceed 160 characters. Something is off with "modern" SMS implementations. This includes a holidays spam message by the provider that basically said "happy holidays" spread-out over four messages. Yes, even the actual full text could've fit inside 160 characters. As I'm still using a 2001-era phone** where the SMS implementation is rather slow, this gets tedious in a hurry, moreso because there is no discernible need to waste messages like that.
  But anyway. I disagree there was any sense whatsoever in the arbitrary twitter limits whichever way you look at it. They just are exactly that: Arbitrary.
  * Not to mention the rather enormous amount of data you're forced to fetch if you don't have a dedicated twitter client and must use the web interface. That moreover won't even work over slow links and a slow browser since it does all the assembling with stupid slow javascript in the browser and will easily time out on you if, say, you're on a flaky wireless link. Even if everything goes well the data transfer is easily upward of a megabyte. And that for "up to 140 characters" worth of world-shattering witty banter. Sheesh.
  ** Good audio quality, works, nice and functional calendar that supports "phone"-appointments, alarm and timer functions, reasonable phone book, usable keys, lets me store data on the SIM and doesn't force me to load it in the phone with no way back on the SIM. All my later phones fail on most of these requirements, even phones from the same manufacturer, and so I reverted.
5. Re:Metadata by ralphius · 2014-12-23 04:47 · Score: 1
  
  Man, you geeks are always making this difficult. Just solve it the easy way: Don't give all the users all the features they want, that would confuse them(as you said). Just give all the users all the features that I want. Much less confusing, and I'm happy!
  You sound like my boss...
6. Re:Metadata by CastrTroy · 2014-12-23 06:26 · Score: 1
  
  I don't know if many people remember this, but you used to (and probably still can) send and receive twitter messages by SMS. This was the original rule for limiting Twitter messages to 140 characters. That gave you enough space to send the twitter handle and the message within the 150 characters allowed by SMS. Before the days of smart phones and data plans people used to regularly send out tweets by sending text messages to 21212.
  
  --
  
  Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
7. Re: Metadata by Ksevio · 2014-12-23 06:29 · Score: 1
  
  The 160 character limit is for 7 bit characters. Twitter uses standard 8 bit characters so is limited to 140.
8. Re:Metadata by georgewad · 2014-12-23 07:31 · Score: 1
  
  He sounds like Steve Jobs.
  
  --
  Karma: It's not just a good idea. It's the law.
9. Re:Metadata by omnichad · 2014-12-23 07:57 · Score: 1
  
  I thought it was 41414, but I haven't used that in almost a year. I think it's still active. I only bought a smart phone this year and I had been using it before that from time to time.
10. Re:Metadata by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-23 08:04 · Score: 0
  
  Hmm, better than the way we do it. We're often asked to implement silly features because a customer asked for them. Ie, customer wants a way to shoot themselves in the foot, management says ok and tells us to make the bullets big enough to be impressive at the demo.
  Also told we have three months to demo a completely new type of product from scratch because they just sold it to a customer.
11. Re:Metadata by Darinbob · 2014-12-23 08:05 · Score: 1
  
  Zombie Steve Jobs eats braiiins!
12. Re: Metadata by Ben+Hutchings · 2014-12-23 14:13 · Score: 1
  
  SMS allows 7-bit, 8-bit and variable-length (UTF-16) encodings, for 160/140/80 code units per message. The 140 character limit leaves some room to add a username prefix when users receive tweets by SMS in a 7-bit encoding.
  Whatever the restrictions of SMS or the original Twitter service, tweets may now use any Unicode character (for some version of Unicode). Whenever they forward tweets by SMS, if they have to use an 8-bit encoding or UTF-16 they may need to split.
"hash" tag by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-22 23:47 · Score: 1

Seems you've been smoking hash when you writing that comment.
Free range pedant cited! by khallow · 2014-12-23 00:38 · Score: 1

Have they finally left that #=pound silliness behind?
I can see him over there. But how am I supposed to throw a net on him and beat him with a stick? This internet thing misses some vital functionality!
Just set my alarm... by bluegutang · 2014-12-23 02:21 · Score: 1

for two years from now.
I can post the exact same article and everyone will think it is new and original. It will get shared widely, and I'll make a day's salary from the ads on the article.
Just another few hundred more somewhat-obscure topics (I can google for ideas), and I'll have a steady indefinite income at the cost of posting a "new" link per day.
This is what passes for "news" nowadays...
Ok lets get something straight here. by koan · 2014-12-23 02:47 · Score: 1

citizen journalism took a big step forward
Twitter used for news is the decline of journalism, not a leap forward.
Nothing makes a news organization look more ridiculous than using twitter post, they are unverifiable at the time used, and more often than not I've watched as they have been proven incorrect or patently false.

--
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
#Blame by wisnoskij · 2014-12-23 03:22 · Score: 1

#So #now #we #know #who #to #blame #for #this #shit.

--
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
1. Re:#Blame by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-23 04:56 · Score: 0
  
  #yestheydeservetodieandihopetheyburninhell-samualjackson
Another SanDiegoFire memory by calidoscope · 2014-12-23 05:08 · Score: 1

One of the most useful instances of social media and Googles apps was a series of postings on a San Diego Union Tribune discussion board related to the fires. The poster was embedding links to a Google Maps page with frequently updated fire perimeter along with reports of where the evacuation centers were being set up. It was very useful as my family and I were about an hour from needing to evacuate when the winds shifted.

--
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
I still read it as "pound" by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-23 05:13 · Score: 0

Wait, do Americans actually call it a hashtag and not poundtag (or if close to Redmond, a sharptag)? Have they finally left that #=pound silliness behind?
#myass
FTFY
There is so much more behind this - 99% Invisible by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-23 06:34 · Score: 0

There is a great podcast - 99% Invisible - that just did an entire episode on the evolution of this. From initial creation of the character, to how it became incorporated on Twitter, to how it is now an overused term in our spoken language today. Definitely worth a listen: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/octothorpe/
Octothorpe by Anonymous Coward · 2014-12-23 07:29 · Score: 0

There is a great podcast on design and engineering, called 99% Invisible, with an episode that covers the history of the Octothorpe(a.k.a. Hash Tag, Pound Sign).
It traces the history of the symbol back to Ancient Rome, through it's integration on the push button phone, all the way to is use in twitter.
Worth a listen:
http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/octothorpe/
Re:There is so much more behind this - 99% Invisib by cowabummer · 2014-12-23 10:38 · Score: 1

I just listened to this episode also! It does a great job outlining the entire history of this character and how the #mainstreammedia has hammered it into the ground
Oblig... by complete+loony · 2014-12-23 11:19 · Score: 1

So then the hashtag spread like wildfire?

--
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.