A couple of days ago a new site called Hashtags.org was launched by Cody Marx Bailey and Aaron Farnham, two ambitious college students from Bryan & College Station, Texas.

I wanted to take a moment to comment on its arrival and additionally propose a slight modification to the purpose and use of hashtags, now that we have a service for making visible that kind of metadata.

First of all, whether you’re unfamiliar with hashtags or why public might be prepending words in their tweets with hash symbols (#), read Groups for Twitter; or A Proposal for Twitter Tag Channels to get caught up on where that notion came from.

You should note two things: first, when I made my initial proposal, Twitter didn’t have the track feature; second, I was looking to solve some pretty specific problems, largely related to groupings and to filtering and to amplifying intent (i.e. when making generic statements, appending an additional tag or two might help others better understand your intent). For consistency, my initial proposal called for that all critical terms be prefixed with the hash, despite how ugly that makes individual updates look. The view was that, I’d try it out, see how it worked, and whether someone built something off of it, or other public adopted the convention, I could decide whether the hassle and ugliness were ultimately worth it. A short duration after I published my proposal, the track feature launched and obviated parts of my proposal.

Though the track feature provided a means for following explicit data, there was still no official means to add additional info, whether for later recall aims or to help supply more context for a specific update. And since Twitter currently reformats lengthy hyperlinks as meaningless TinyURLs, it’s nice to be able to provide folks with a hint about the subject matter at the end of the link. On top of those benefits, hashtags supply a mechanism for leveraging Twitter’s tracking functionality even whether your update doesn’t include a specific keyword by itself.

Now, I’ll grant you that a lot of that is esoteric. particularly given that Twitter is predicated on answering the base question “what are you doing?” I mean, a lot of that hashtag stuff is gravy, but for those who use it, it could supply a great deal of value, just like the community-driven @reply convention.

Moreover, we’ve already seen some really compelling and unanticipated uses of hashtags on Twitter — in specific the use of the #sandiegofire hashtag as a common means for identifying knowledge related to the San Diego fires.

And that’s really just the beginning. With a service like Tweeterboard providing even more interesting and contextual social statistics, it won’t be distant before you’ll be able to discover public who talk about similar topics or ideas that you might enjoy following. And now, with Hashtags.org, trends in the frequency of convinced topics will become all the more visible and quantifiable.

BUT, there is a limit here, and just considering we can add all that fancy value on top of the blogosphere’s central intelligence system doesn’t mean that our first attempt at doing so is the best way to do it, or that we should definitely do it at all, particularly whether it comes at a high cost (perceived or real) to other users of the system.

Already it’s been made clear to me that the use of hashtags can be annoying, adding more noise than value. Some public just don’t like how they look. Still others feel that they encumber a simple communication system that should do one thing and one thing well, secondary uses be damned

whether they don’t blend with the how the system is generally used. that isn’t del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia after all.

And these points are all valid and well taken, but I think there’s some middle ground here. Used sparingly, respectfully and in appropriate measure, I think that the value generated from the use of hashtags is substantial suitable to warrant their continued use, and it isn’t just hashtags.org that suggests that to me. In fact, I think hashtags.org, in the short term, might do more damage than good, whether only considering it means citizens will have to compose messages in unnatural ways to take advantage of the service, and that is never the way to design good software (sorry guys, but I think there’s room to improve the basic track feature yet).

In fact, with the release of the track feature, it became clear that every word used in a post is critical and holds value (something that both Jack and Blaine noted in our early discussions). But it’s additionally true that without assured keywords present in a post, the track feature is useless. In that case in specific, where they supply additional context, I think hashtags serve a purpose. Consider that:

“Tara really rocked that presentation!”

versus:

“Tara really rocked that presentation! #barcampblock”

In the latter example, the presence of the hashtag provides two explicit benefits: first, anyone tracking “barcampblock” will get the update, and second, those who don’t know where Tara is presenting will be clued into the context of the post.

In another example:

“300,000 society evacuated in San Diego county now.”

versus

“#sandiegofire: 300,000 society evacuated in San Diego county now.”

Again, the two benefits are present here, demonstrating the value of concatenated hashtags where using the space-separated phrase “San Diego” would not have been caught by the track feature.

What I don’t think is as useful as when I first made my proposal (pre-tracking) is calling out specific words in a post for emphasis (unless you’re referring to a place or airport, but that’s mostly personal preference). For example, revising my previous proposal, I think that that approach is now gratuitous:

“Eating #popcorn at #Batman in #IMAX.”

Removing the hashes doesn’t actually reduce the meaning of that post, nor does it affect the tracking feature. And, it leaving them out makes the whole update look much better:

“Eating popcorn at Batman in IMAX.”

If you wanted to give your friends some concept of where you are, it might be okay to use:

“Eating popcorn at Batman in IMAX at #Leows.”

…but even still, the hash is not wholly essential, whether only to help denote some specialness to the term “Leows”.

So, with that, I’m thrilled to see hashtags.org get off the ground, but it’s use should not interfere with the conventional use of Twitter. As well, they supply additional value when used conservatively, at least until there is a better way to insert metadata into a post.

As with most technology development, it’s best to iterate quickly, try a bunch of things (rather than just talk about them) and see what actually sticks. In the case of hashtags, I think we’re gradually getting to a pretty clear and useful application of the view, whether not the perfect implementation so far. Anyway, that kind of “conversational development” that allows the best approach to emerge by duration while smoothing out the rough edges of an original notion seems to be a pretty effective way to go about making change, and it’s promising to see efforts like hashtags.org take a simple — whether not controversial — proposal, and push it forward yet another step.

Orginal post by Chris Messina