You may have noticed that Twitter has started hyperlinking hashtags. Those are words preceded by a “#” which denote what the Tweet is about and makes it easier to search for Tweets about specific topics and events. For instance, try searching for #realtimecrunchup. Now that they are hyperlinked, when you click on a hashtag, you are led to the search result page for the specific hashtag. Others have been implementing this; FriendFeed (big surprise) has been doing this for awhile. Some of the Twitter clients, including the desktop versions of Tweetie and Seesmic Desktop also provide hyperlinks to hashtags.
For Twitter, search is a navigation tool, and this functionality is yet one more way to allow people to easily discover new Tweets outside their group of followers. This trend started when they added the search box to everyone’s home page last April.
Real-time search is heating up. Just earlier today, FriendFeed launched its own real-time search. By linking to hashtags, Twitter is giving people another entry point into its existing search. Now, if you could only track mentions of specific hashtags over time.
hasn’t it been like that for, like, ever?
Surprisingly it hasn’t. I think we’re all so used to Hashtags being hyperlinked on our 3rd party Twitter clients, that we forgot Twitter themselves were a little lagging behind (as usual).
I have never used a third party client and I can swear that I have seen the hashtags hyperlinked on twitter.com
me too!
It was in the search interface, but not the regular stream interface.
Well I use search most of the time. That explains why I seem to think it has always been there.
I like some of the things the twitter folks are doing.. but they HAVE to do something about the Advarts. I get 10 spamming advarts for every real person that wants to follow. And follow friday is now ’spammer friday’ .
I’ll be sure to give this a whirl. Thanks for the info!
It’s pretty cool I guess. There is a directory of useful web apps at http://AppUseful.com. They give you the power to rank and rate your fav apps!
i thought it was always like this as well
You can check mentions of specific hastags over time by saving the search.
I like twitter, but it strikes me as the not ready for prime time social app.
Umm. Cool?
Slow news day?
Anything they can do to make the site easier will bring more mainstream users and thus more popularity, which is always good in the long run. However, I too was under the impression that it was like this before. If it was like this or not before is irrelevant though, just as long as it works smoothly now.
If only CNN knew how to use it…did you see their last tweet?
cnnbrk An Indian court has ruled that consensual sex between adults of the same gender is legal. #gaysex
they also seem to have removed the ability to search for hashtags on search.twitter.com (or at least its broken for me)
Its great that Twitter is improving the navigation aspect of itself. Now only if they could focus more on Security they can stop the profiles from being hijacked.
They need to find a way to filter the trending topics because most of the time it’s either a promotional stunt (#moonfruit) or silly polls (#3thingstosayduringsex).
I wanted to give some pertinent link love back to the folks at TC
http://twitter....atus/2444847326
Nifty.
Tnx
That’s wonderful, I bet the spammers at moonfruit are happy…
here is the one tweet you need to know:
DM @spam moontweet
they need to be banned from twitter
Excellent twitter listened to me :p
http://twitter....atus/1793948340 I asked for it on May 14th
Thanks Leena
This will make it even more valuable to have a keyword (with hashtags) strategy for your tweets. I love how twitter and social media in general is a constantly evolving space
@michaelqtodd
It really must be frustrating to be FriendFeed. They have all the innovation, but no one cares.
Hey that’s good addition must say, I didn’t notice it for so long I always thought it was always there. After reading I just checked the twitter and felt why I didn’t notice it earlier.
Sonal Maheshwari
USourceIT: Submit a RFP for all types of IT projects.
I agree with @calvinrobinson – Surprisingly it hasn’t. I think we’re all so used to Hashtags being hyperlinked on our 3rd party Twitter clients, that we forgot Twitter themselves were a little lagging behind (as usual).
This post is funny ( to me and I had to do a triple-take) because at Twubs our slogan has always been “Hashtags Made Useful”. The folks reading this story might find Twubs useful, relevant, and intriguing. Twubs allows hashtags to have titles, descriptions, tags, branding AND aggregates tweets, videos, twitpics, news feeds, links, (”and more” of course) around hashtags.
We also have “Live Event” and “Conference” packages / functions around hashtags (think tweets + page branding and customization + rich content + interactive questions + moderation + “and more” )
Check out the TechCrunch Twub: http://twubs.com/techcrunch/
It’s about time to be honest! Now we need the ability to group on the site with leverage to port over to EVERY desktop client/iPhone app!!
so how can I make # linkable? Lets say for our #pizzatweetup to link to http://www.pizzatweetup.com for example? How does the link get established?
Now, if you could only go directly to some pages that all these hashtags are about, that would be nice.
Hey guys, can you recommend any third party group twitter client? Is there such a thing?
Group twitter?
Would be interested in building one possibly. Contact me
Fantastic. Now if we can get companies to stop spamming with hashtag give-away contests we’ll have something really exciting here.
Craig – you don’t get to specify a URL to associate with a hashtag, the tag is merely a way to find related tweets on a particular topic.
You could invent a hash tag in your tweet and also specify a URL. Then, folks searching for that tag would find your tweet and click it. Kind of indirect…
Didn’t realize Twitter was using hashtags until a buddy of mine said something. I just thought there were no tags associated with tweets. Hashtags make a lot of sense.
I just want to know why some hash tag searches are blocked.
http://twitter....followSouljaBoy
I think it ’s very useful all .Good feature.