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How a Wildfire Helped Spread the Hashtag
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.
Hashtags are polluting search results when it comes to IRC channels.
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
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.
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
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.
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!