I would rather try to explain Global Warming as opposed to Twitter, but I find myself doing it almost daily. Now, it seems that Twitter is just about a household name, especially since Jay Leno went on for 30 minutes about it last night. I don’t know if any other social network has ever experienced rapid growth like Twitter has experienced over the past 12 months or so, it’s incredible.
In addition to the “what is twitter?” question I get almost 4 times daily, I also have a lot of people ask me about #hashtags and why we use these for keywords like #nascar #arkansas #php or #wordpress. Instead of trying to explain what they are, I found a good explanation of their purpose and usage on hashtags.org today and thought I would pass it along:
Hashtags was designed to accommodate the real-time news community. We provide analytic reports and indexing features to allow users to track what’s happening now.
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.
To get a better idea as to how #hashtags are used I recommend checking out #hashtags website. Also, just a note, we are going to be using the #UR09 hashtag this weekend during the Unlimited Realm Conference at The Church Alive, if you are on Twitter and are following along this weekend, be sure to drop us a tweet…
This is good to know. I kinda knew but your explanation is good. I do find it hard to get into the habit of using them.
Great Work !
Regards
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