ReadWriteWeb

As we reported last week, groups of hackers from all around the world got together this weekend to find ways to help Haiti and to create tools that can be used in future disasters. One of these groups, in collaboration with Project EPIC, developed a new syntax to make it easier for computers to read tweets from areas that are affected by a disaster. If adopted widely, this new hashtag-based syntax will make it easier to automatically extract data about locations or the status of a road or person.

Tinker, a new service that aggregates Twitter conversations around topics, came out of private beta today. Unlike services that merely attempt to track Twitter hashtag trends or attempt to describe what context a hashtag brings to a tweet, Tinker lets its users select popular events that are already being tracked, or create their own event stream by choosing a keyword or hashtag and adding a few filters, such as 'no swear words' and selective blocking of individual Twitter or Tinker users.

So you've joined Twitter and have finally started to get the hang of things. You know to put an "@" sign in front of usernames for public replies and you know how to send private messages with a "d." You filled out your profile and have mastered the art of TinyURLs. You even found some interesting people to follow and have started conversations with them. There's just one thing holding you back from complete Twittervana: those odd-looking abbreviations in people's tweets preceded by the pound sign (#). Congratulations, you've stumbled upon the Twitter hashtag, a tracking tool for Twitter topics. But what do they mean?

According to the people at Twimbler, the answer is yes, but we're not so sure we see the point. Twimbler is a new Twitter mashup that uses a special hashtag to parse Twitter posts into a tumblelog format. The result is a tumblelog that you post to via Twitter, and to be frank, it's kind of silly.