If you’ve spent any time on twitter, you may have noticed people closing tweets with a text like this:
#3turnoffwords
or
#followfriday
or
#tcc
You may wondering, what do those mean?
Well, those are called “hashtags” and essentially they are topics that people are talking about. In the current version of twitter, the application is kind enough to show you in the sidebar what the most popular topics are at any given moment.
If a topic you’re interested in isn’t in the sidebar, no worries, you can actually perform a twitter search and find all of the conversations with that hashtag in the last 55 days, roughly.
How do you participate?
To participate in a discussion, just add the hashtag to the end of your tweet. So for instance to take part in the above #3turnoffwords topic you would tweet something like this:
whachu talkin bout? #3turnoffwords
That tweet would then show in the #3turnoffwords stream.
What’s the point of these tags?
There really isn’t one. I mean, people use the tags to help other people find or keep track of topics that people are talking about on twitter, but there really isn’t a “point” beyond that.
Can I get my own tag?
Sure, if you’re thinking about starting a topic and using a hash tag, do a search to find if anyone else is using that tag for something else already, and if not, just start using it. Sure, there are websites that “register” the tags, but you don’t have to use those sites, nor do you need to get permission from twitter or even the previous user of the tag before you start using it.
In fact, I encourage you to start using/ creating them and get more involved in the Twitter community.
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