The whole world (on Twitter) is watching messages shared with hashtags like #jan25 and #egypt, where people are self-organizing online content about topics of global interest. Click on one of those terms, or anything with a # sign before it, on Twitter and you'll be brought to a search page filled with all the messages using that tag. People use hashtags on Twitter to share fun topics of conversation as well, they are regularly among the most popular topics of conversation on the site.

But what was the first hashtag ever used? According to serial social technology innovator Chris Messina (on Twitter), it was the above: #barcamp. Used in August of 2007, the #barcamp hashtag was intended to bundle conversation about the global technology unconference gatherings called Barcamp that Messina helped found as well. Now hashtags are showing up everywhere. On the sides of busses, (referenced) in The New York Times and this weekend Audi will bring a hashtag to the Superbowl for the first time.

Hashtags are a little thing, but they have become big deal.

If you're a pro Twitterer, skip ahead to details about the new hashtag resource.

About Hashtags

Hashtags in Twitter are a community-driven convention for adding metadata to your tweets. They were originally developed to create groups on Twitter for tracking a topic. Initially, they only worked in combination with a service from hashtags.org which provides real-time hashtag tracking. All you had to do was opt-in by following Twitter user @hashtags.

Now, with Twitter's purchase of search engine Summize, Twitter itself tracks hashtags at search.twitter.com. The engine can actually track keywords too, making hashtags not quite as necessary for trend tracking as they were in the past. However, hashtags still have their advantages - you know that anyone tagging their tweet with one of these acronyms means for it to get categorized within that topic. It also serves as a visual indicator to others following their Twitter stream that they're tweeting about a particular subject.

The basic structure of a hashtag is simple: it's the pound sign (#) followed by an acronym or word. For example, the hashtag #sxsw recently appeared for tracking the annual festival in Austin, Texas called South by Southwest.

But What Does that Hashtag Mean?

The problem for new Twitter users (and many old pros too) is that the use of hashtags has become so prevalent that it's hard to keep track of what they all stand for. And with new ones popping up every day for the most obscure of subjects, there's no way to guess at their meaning. Sometimes, even hot topics get tagged with odd hashtags that may leave you scratching your head. Did you know, for instance, that the tag #nSOTU is used for tracking any Presidential speech from Barack Obama that's Not the State of the Union address?

Although you can still look up a particular hashtag at hashtags.org, the site doesn't explain what the tag means. (It does, however, point you to photos, videos, and links in addition to tracking the stream.)

But if you just want to know what the heck people are talking about, a new resource may be a better option for you: Tagalus, a service that defines hashtags. Think of it as a hashtag dictionary. You can use Tagalus to understand what hashtags mean and see the latest tweets surrounding that subject.

How to Use Tagalus

Tagalus lets users vote on definitions for tags if there's more than one version. The definition with the most votes will be the one that defines the tag. As you invent new tags or if you just want to help build the resource, all you have to do is send a tweet to @tagalus to suggest a meaning for a tag. The format for doing so is as follows:

Example: @tagalus define mynewtag as a new tag that describes everything about me

If you want to know what a tag means, you can also ask @tagalus. The format for this is: @tagalus define ______.

Example: @tagalus define ip4

In this example, Tagalus would respond:

ip4 = Ignite Portland 4 - a "hipster event" according to KGW

The Tagalus API

The ProgrammableWeb blog also notes that Tagalus has an API which developers could use to build hashtag defining functionality into their Twitter client applications. That would make the service even more useful to the Twitter community, so we hope developers take notice and do just that.

So, to keep track of these rapidly changing situations, we (and be "we" I mean "Jared") have created a widget that tracks news about the uprisings, their context and their build-up by pulling the feeds from them from Twitter Search. And we (and by "we" I mean "I") would like to share them with you.

Tinker lets you get the word out on your event by allowing you to embed a widget with recent activity around your event. The widget they allow you to use, however, uses an iframe, which may not appeal to everyone. Each event does have its own RSS feed though, so a generic RSS feed widget can be used.

We spent some time tinkering with the new service and we have some reservations. The big one: You can search for hashtags or keywords directly on Twitter's search portal. Since Tinker does not actually have its own comment engine, all contributions made via the Tinker interface go straight back in to Twitter and, more importantly, have the same issue as Twitter posts, which is simply that there is no 'conversation'. Your posts, either on Tinker or Twitter simply serve to enlarge the buzz on those topics, but nothing to really connect Tinker users together through conversation. This can be plainly seen on the most active events where it's impossible to keep up with all the updates happening at any given time.

Tinker has other problems too, like the standard 'free' accounts only allow creating events around a single keyword or hashtag. Apparently, more powerful searches are reserved for paying customers or site partners. Again, this severely limits what an average user can do, to the point where making a new event seems almost redundant. Finally, maybe it is because the service is new, but when I tried to create an event (using the occasionally used hashtag #sleep, you can see it here), it took quite a while for Tinker to show relevant tweets, then it decided to double all the tweets in the listing. On top of that, it allowed me to send several updates without confirming that they were actually posted to Twitter. As a result, I ended up spamming my Twitter friends with a bunch of duplicate tweets.

Update: Samir Arora (@samirarora), founder of Glam Media sent me a tweet stating that they are looking in to the duplicate issue. Thanks Samir!

How Does it Work

The new syntax is pretty easy to learn. Every tweet should contain at least one main tag like #need [explain need], #offering or #injured [name]. You can find a full list of main tags here. In addition, tweets can also have data tags like #name [name], #loc [location] or #contact [email, phone etc.]. These tweets can also contain often-used keywords that don't need the hashtag sign like food, supplies, road, hospital or help.

Examples

Here are some real-world examples of this new syntax being used in Haiti:

• #haiti #need security #loc General Hospital PAP #contact @thehatian
• #haiti #need water #loc Orphanage Foyer de Sion #contact @robinbauer #src @AnnCurry
• Can you deliver beans rice water to orphanage? #Haiti #Need Food #Contact: @childhopeintl #Loc: Delmas 75, Rue Cassagnol #14, PaP BLESS YOU

We aren't aware of any tools that read these tweets yet, but it's easy to imagine a Google Maps mashup that can show the locations of where people need help.

If you would like to help the Project EPIC and Crisis Camp teams out, have a look at the groups' website, which lists a number of ways to get involved in this project, ranging from translating tweets into the new hashtag format, to building applications that can collect the data from these tweets.

I think Twitter may be the same thing, except for language. In spoken English, it can take decades - even centuries - for new words to emerge, become part of common parlance, and then fade into disuse.

Is that the pattern? And how closely does it map onto the ways that words and phrases earworm their way into spoken language?

Maybe some up-and-coming linguistics student is already mapping the ways hashtags rise and decay, and getting ready to publish a dissertation... in 140-character increments.

Meanwhile, people, seriously - "snowicane"?

More Noise to Signal.

Twitter Census is probably the most sophisticated service in this mini-roundup. It takes advantage of the hashtags concept to track poll responses. Specifically, it tracks the #Survey hashtag. Users tweet a question referencing the #Survey hashtag, and then set a unique hashtag to log the responses. For example, if you wanted to poll your followers to see which was the most popular birth month among them, you might send out something like, "#Survey In what month were you born? #birthmonth" To respond, your followers need only reference your hashtag in an @ reply aimed at you, like: "@you February #birthmonth"

Twitter Census then tracks the results and displays them in a graph. The results are stored at a unique URL that is formed by joining username and survey hashtag, for example: http://twittercensus.com/hellp-tclaunch/. It has some neat features, like normalizing responses (so that "web 2.0," "web20" and "web2.0" are all the same thing) and the ability for people to include comments with their answers. Unfortunately, though Twitter Census could be a useful tool for polling your followers, it doesn't look like that many people are actually using it.

But say you don't have a large group of followers to draw on. Enter Twitter Answers. Twitter Answers is a Q&A service build around Twitter that is essentially a gateway to the Mosio mobile question and answer community (also see our round up of general Q&A sites).

Twitter Answers works by taking questions that users send via direct message to the service's Twitter account (QnA) and then outputting them to the Mosio community. Mosio members then send in their answers, which are listed on the on the Twitter Answers site and tweeted back to the asker. Unfortunately, Twitter Answers only allows for up to 4 answers per question.

Unlike Twitter Answers and Twitter Census, which help facilitate the asking of questions on Twitter, StrawPoll is aiming to create a community around polls. StrawPoll asks its followers a new question once every day, and users can vote with an @ reply including their reason. The poll results are collected and displayed in real-time (if you reload often) on the beautiful StrawPoll web site. It would be cool if users had some input into what questions get asked, though.

Like StrawPoll, TwittPoll is about answering questions sent to you via a Twitterbot. Unlike StrawPoll, the voting is done outside of Twitter -- the bot sends out a question with a pair of choices and links to voting pages for each choice. And even more unlike StrawPoll, TwittPoll doesn't seem to be active -- no new questions have come down the pipe in about a month.

Are there any polling services for Twitter that we missed? Do you use any of the above services? Let us know in the comments.

Twitter Censoring Trends: Is it Enough?

At the end of the day, we agree with Twitter's decision to pull the obviously forced hashtag from the trends section just as they did the last time a bunch of folks thought they would have some fun by tweeting other offensive words and phrases. But these incidents have made us wonder: has Twitter trends outlived its ability to function properly as an entirely algorithm-based service? Given how many people rely on Twitter trends to track hot topics and breaking news, the section will be under constant attack from those who want to use the algorithm for their own purposes...and not necessarily good ones.

In some cases, like the latest 4chan move, the term-made-trend will be a somewhat offensive, but ultimately harmless prank. In other cases, the trends will be courtesy of some marketer pushing their hashtag up through the ranks thanks to their latest "tweet-to-win" contest. But do either of these cases represent an organic news-based trend that deserves the spotlight? Perhaps not.

Although censorship isn't something that most people would normally support, in these cases it would feel less like censorship than it would a simple act of filtering. It's easy to see that "trends" like these aren't really the sort of trends that the section was meant to highlight. However, by letting the algorithm do all the work, everyone with an evil plan to get their hashtag into the leaderboard has a shot at 15 minutes of fame. And on the real-time web, that's an eternity.

If, on the other hand, Twitter started pre-filtering the trends for relevance, there would long be a reason for hoaxsters, pranksters, and other trend-hogging marketers to attempt to game the system. Just by putting a human editor in charge of Twitter trends, "fake trends" like these could easily be avoided. Even if the company didn't want to go with full-on censorship, they could at the very least move the "other" trends off the main page by adding a link that said "More..."

Filtered Trends Could Delay Breaking News

But the drawback to a human-filtered trends section could be a delay in seeing breaking news make trend status - and that would be a disaster for a service that's all about immediacy. For some people, even the threat of a delay such as this would probably have them saying, "forget censorship and filtering - I want real-time trends, legit or not!"

But to those people, we ask: what about when Twitter becomes so uber-popular that the real-time trends section you crave becomes filled with junk trends thanks to internet memes and marketers' messages? Will you still prefer it then?

We're not sure if a human editor is the right solution for Twitter, but one day soon, something will have to be done. One commenter on a previous post mentioned some other ideas for filtering trends and hashtag spam, including having users tweet "#spam=hashtag" and suggesting Twitter adds a feature which would let us block hashtags from our streams. Another commenter suggested Outlook-like rules for hiding certain hashtags. If you have any ideas of your own about what Twitter should do, feel free to share them in the comments.

But what is being observed now is even more curious, especially since Google has to rely on links pointing toward Twitter Search on specific topics in order to get a hint about relevancy at all. It makes us wonder how Google would rank these results if Twitter did actually optimize their search offering for SEO.

You can see for yourself easily enough; simply search for a popular Twitter hashtag term like #sxsw or #gaza and the Twitter search link should be in the first page of results.

But the problem is that Twimbler doesn't do enough to differentiate itself from a normal Twitter stream, nor enough to really be a very robust tumblelogging platform. Twimbler is built around links. You tweet links at it via a hashtag, and it parses those links into posts. It recognizes YouTube vidoes and embeds those, but doesn't recognize images (as far as we could tell), nor does it recognize videos from other services. That means that it's basically a Twitter stream with YouTube videos embedded.

Because it is based on links, Twimbler also misses some of the features that most tumblelogging platforms support, such as quotes, events, or regular posts.

The final nail in Twimbler's coffin, however, is that many tumblelogging platforms, including Tumblr, support the automatic posting of your Twitter stream (among other outside activity streams). So if you really wanted to run a tumblelog off your Twitter stream, Tumblr could do it for you and offer a complete tumblelogging platform to boot. It won't parse YouTube video links from tweets into embeds, but I don't think that's enough of a differentiator to make Twimbler worth it.

What Twimbler does do well, however, is illustrate how services can use hashtags to build utility on top of Twitter. While checking out Twimbler I couldn't help but think that a neat bookmarking tool could be build on top of Twitter that way -- maybe a service that used a #delicious hash tag to send bookmarks to your del.icio.us account, for example.

If you've never used Tweetdeck, it's the most powerful application available for sending and receiving Twitter messages. It's about to become even more awesome.

Language translation is now available in the drop down "more actions" menu inside every user profile next to a tweet. It's a pretty rough translation, as these things always are - but how cool is that anyway? Twitter is a very international phenomenon - now we can grunt at each other across languages a little more effectively.

Stocktwits is a fast-growing startup that hosts conversation and news tracking around the stock market. Now Tweetdeck will let you tie in your Stocktwits account and create Friends, Portfolio, Recommended, Commentary and "all" columns. We expect that to be quite popular.

Hashtag Support comes in the form of a new drop down to the right of your message composition window, displaying one-click links to add any of your 10 most recently used hashtags. When you reply to a message that included a hashtag - that same hashtag will be automatically appended to your reply. That's going to keep conversations much more coherent.

User Search lets you set up a column to search for any username - see what people are saying to and about people of interest.

One Column View is a quick little button you can hit to zip your full screen Tweetdeck down into just one column, the easier to watch it next to a browser with. Click it again and it will expand to full size.

There are a number of other new additions, from easier group management to email forwarding of tweets to some API access improvements. There may be some changes users don't like, as well.

All we can say for now, having just used it for a little while, is that the most powerful Twitter interface available is not slowing down - it just keeps getting better.

If you'd like to befriend the ReadWriteWeb staff on Twitter here are our accounts - we'd love to meet you too!

Wael Ghonim, the former Google executive who launched We are all Khalid Said, the Facebook page that acted as a clearinghouse for the uprising, has fallen under opprobrium for recent comments and a lot of the criticism is being expressed via the Twitter hashtag #unfollowedghonimbecause.

According to Foreign Policy's Passport blog, Ghonim has recently encouraged his fellow citizens to ease off on political change in order to stabilize the country economically.

"Economy should be the priority for the revolutionaries," Ghonim said in a translation, "because it is the safety valve which will guarantee the continuation of the revolution and the cleansing of Egypt from corruption."

This incensed a number of Egyptians, including whoever is behind @ghonimwithballs, who tweeted, "How about this: Unfollow @Ghonim, then fire a tweet with #UnfollowedGhonimBecause. Let your voice be heard."

Many have, including @amirakhalil46, who tweeted, "i #UnfollowedGhonimBecause he's a sell-out. Falling for the 'economic stability' manipulative tactic!! Forgetting what #Jan25 is all about."

Criticism seemed to center on prioritizing economics over political progress but he was also indicted for not speaking out strongly against the Army's post-revolution abuses.

Revolutions, when they are clear of their immediate goals of dismantling the existing power structure, have a great deal of settling out to do. You can see it in Tunisia as well, where censorship has returned. You already saw it in Egypt with the sentencing by the military of a blogger.

The backlash against Ghonim may be another brick in the wall or it may merely be one of the post-revolutionary obstacles all revitalized states have to negotiate. As Passport noted, "Few of the big Egyptian Twitterati, however, joined in, and the hastag devolved into crude personal attacks and bad jokes."

Sponsored hashtags can blow up in your face, they can be stolen by a competitor and they can be surrounded by risky UGC. But they can also very quickly achieve some great attention for your brand. Choosing to advertise on Twitter is a risky move, ripe with opportunity and danger. It shouldn't be undertaken lightly or without serious thought.

Walgreens recently purchased some love on Twitter, literally. In choosing the self-serving hashtag, #ILoveWalgreens, the company made a grievous error. They assumed love that wasn't there.

People enjoy going out to eat, so they might love a favorite restaurant. Many enjoy shopping for clothes, so they might admit to loving a favorite designer or even a boutique store. People might even love their doctor or hairdresser, but very few people love fast food restaurants, grocery stores, plumbers or pharmacies. In these cases, you can't buy love, but you can buy attention, and the two are different beasts.

The social media spend, designed to combat a very specific issue, was inappropriately broad and presumptive. A better case would have been to focus on the problem, that Walgreens could no longer accept Express Scripts, and choose a tag that supported their efforts there, like #freedominhealthcare or #yourscriptchoice and gave voice to a public who feels unheard and unloved when it comes to healthcare decisions.

Hulu's Arrested Hashtag

Hulu is sponsoring a hashtag to promote their Superbowl commercial with Will Arnett. The hashtag, #mushymush, is in reference to their ongoing theme of alien world domination through excessive media intake.

While their hashtag is on point, it's not a hashtag that is particularly interesting to their average fan. Hulu could have been more daring, and ended up with real traction had they chosen a hashtag that would really resonate with their viewers.

Because they chose an Arrested Development star, and dropped several references into the ad, they could have created buzz by pointing that out or even asking Arrested Development fans to count the number of references in the video. This, of course, would mean a heavy focus on the show and that may not be in the best interest of a big Superbowl spend. But there are many ways they could have jazzed this up, and stayed show-neutral. Hulu is staffed by a variety of cool and fun folks, as evidenced by the campaign itself. Creativity is important and #mushymush can't have been the most interesting thing that came out of their advertising department.

They also did a poor job of communicating what they wanted. While they did get some high profile retweets, from Roku and Yahoo_Screen, many of the other dozen tweets are either done by Hulu themselves or by Hulu employees. If they asked their employees to share the video, which isn't a bad thing at all, they should have also suggested sample copy. Their star even tweeted about it without using the hashtag, as did most of the folks who watched the video and shared it. There's no call to action on their viral mechanism, the video. Why not end the video with the hashtag? I'm laughing, give me some instructions as to what I should do to share the funny with my friends.

Subway Offers Up a Footlong Hashtag

Photo credit Luca Falda

Unlike Hulu, who couldn't get any attention on Twitter for their hashtag, Subway has gotten attention, but the wrong kind. Their main problem wasn't in their choice of hashtag, it was that they didn't gauge sentiment before they advertised on the social network.

From people angry that a $5 foot long really wasn't $5, to employees who resent having to work at Subway, the hashtag is a busy one, rife with anger. To be fair to Subway, however, there is a solid amount of positive sentiment in their resulting tweets too.

They could decrease some of the negativity if they let Subway employees know that they are about to release a trending hashtag and ask for their support. They should also react in some way to the negatives, using Twitter. I would suggest reaching out to all of the negatives and thanking them for their feedback. Who knows, there could be some positive engagement with the brand to come from it, rather than just pulling the hashtag when the going gets tough.

The Takeaway

What we can learn here is that there is no easy ad spend. Whether you're slapping a vinyl cling on your car to promote your housecleaning business or coordinating a multi-million dollar ad campaign for an international beverage maker, the details matter. Creativity grabs your attention, but it's the practical details that ensure the brand is remembered and the call to action is acted upon.

Advertising on a social network is not different in this regard, but there are parts of this ad spend that are unique to the medium. Prepare your employees with detailed instructions that recommend appropriate behavior. Choose to align with existing sentiment, and don't make it all about you. Do some preliminary insights gathering, and be prepared to shelve the entire thing if the risk outweighs the benefits.

But so much has been said in such better ways by people better positioned to comment intelligently - the issue recently earned its own hashtag, which tells you something - that I deleted the whole thing.

More Noise to Signal

If SXSW doesn't interest you, or if you're able to rise above it all, then my hat's off to you and your Zen-like transcendence.

And if that doesn't help, well, there's always the Sally Struthers approach.

More Noise to Signal.