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!

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.

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.