There’s been a lot of chatter recently about the reliability of Twitter’s trending topics and how to make sense of hashtags. Hashtags 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. This weekend’s “Moonfruit” and “GorillaPenis” trending topics on Twitter were examples of trending topics that aren’t easily recognizable and aren’t current events. Personally, I find trending topics and hashtags to be confusing at times because there’s little context surround them on Twitter. And many of the Trending Topics aren’t necessarily breaking news and is often polluted by spam. What The Hashtag is a site launched to solve this exact problem.
What The Hashtag provides detailed definitions and context of hashtags and trending topics on Twitter. But what makes the site even more interesting is that it provides hashtag use stats, top contributors to a particular hashtag, real-time hashtag stream monitoring, and charts. For example, the entry for the hashtag #moonfruit has a graph charting the frequency of the hashtag in Tweets sent out in a given time period, a detailed description of the context behind the Moonfruit, how many Tweets included Moonfruit (443,217) and a real-time stream of Tweets with the Moonfruit hashtag.
What The Hashtag reports that it has analyzed and tracked 2,775 hashtags since its launch in February 2009. So far the site has 800 registered users (registration needed for detailed info entry; simple definitions can be submitted without account). The site is adding the ability to Tweet from the site and opening up its API in the near future.
What The Trend, which we reviewed here, is a fairly similar service that also makes sense of trending topics and hashtags on Twitter. The two services have many of the same features but a few differences. What The Trend pulls in news stories and photos about trending topics, but doesn’t include some of the analytics and graphing that What The Hasthag offers. It appears that What The Hashtag’s details goes more in-depth with the detailed descriptions and stats, but both sites are pretty useful when trying to make sense of Twitter’s enigmatic Trending Topics.
pretty smart stuff
Very cool stuff by them – utilize their site to track usage on #CmtyChat – but the best part of their service are the transcripts. For the more informative chats that happen on a weekly basis, users are always looking for a log of the chat, so WTHashtag definitely solves this problem. Kudos.
You guys are bit late posting this. I already read this at Tech 24 Hours on May 29, 2009.
Check it out, here’s the link, for proof:- http://www.tech...ing-topics.html
Yes, I also remember reading it at Tech 24 Hours before TechCrunch.
Nice – wonder what’s going to happen to all these niche wikis in the end though. Or should someone be building a meta-wiki?
Hmm… looks cool. There seem to be a lot of services like this. I think I like What the Hashtag the best but it’ll only work if one of them gets to be the standard.
I agree completely. One of these sites is going to take off and that will become the standard. We just hope the one that takes off is ours.
When we launched What the Hashtag, there were already 2-3 other sites trying to do something similar. That is why we’ve taken things farther with hashtag statistics, our own real-time streaming widget with OAuth for posting, plus the obvious context surrounding a hashtag.
Thanks for your feedback and thanks to TechCrunch for this article!
Wish you all the best, Mike. Keep up the good work. I hope “What The Trend.com” becomes the standard site for deciphering Twitter Trending Topics. I love it and use it myself. It helps me in keeping up with the latest topic trends at Twitter.
I don’t think Mike wants “What the Trend” to be the standard! :)
Look where his name links to!!!
Yes. I’ve given your site a better look. It’s awesome! I guarantee you’ll be the standard.
I was a little confused at first. I was just browsing on the site—didn’t register. The UI for a logged-out user is very confusing. Once I logged in, it made more sense.
Anyways, you should redesign the “recently added hashtags” section for logged-out users so it looks more like what it does where you are logged in!
One more thing! I know this might be a little bit hard with MediaWiki but if I were you, I would ditch the OpenID and let people log in with their Twitter account. You might even want to get rid of the normal account creation an ultimitly only allow people to use their Twitter app with the site.
I suggest this for multiple reasons. First of all, having all these login methods but no Twitter login method for a Twitter site is ridiculous. Secondly, you kind of want people to have to use their Twitter account to use your site. Why? Only people with Twitter accounts have the knowledge to define a hash tag. Also, if everyone on the site is logged in on Twitter, their is some potential to do something with that in the future.
I’ve looked into it quite a bit, believe me. Unfortunately there are no extensions for “Twitter Connect” or whatever you want to call it so it’s going to have to be a meticulously crafted, brand new extension. Being a relative newcomer to MediaWiki development and the lone developer for our team, I’m inundated with things to do. If you know anyone that can/wants to help, send em our way!
I didn’t know tags existed in twitter until the #IranElections events happened. This is how I got curious about this article. But how do you see twitts of a particular topic? How do you know what topics exist and are popular?
The problem with those approaches is that it requires traversing to another web site (login) and manually entering the definition of a tag.
I had a different suggestion, following from the history of Twitter features not defined by twitter (@, #, RT)- a meta language could be created within twitter, so that I might tweet something like:
.define #htc09 Hash Tag Conference 2009, join us July 31 at the Toledo La Quinta http://bit.ly/….
so a syntax of “.define” before a hash tag means the definition comes afterward. It could be this or some other construct- the point is, that a meta language could be rolled right into twitter.
I only have the idea http://cogdogblog.com/3700 not the code power to create a service. It could be someone’s Big Idea to Get Rich.
Your idea of the .define syntax is interesting but it doesn’t provide the same functionality. Anyway, Twitter is all about 3rd party functionality. Take TwitPic for example!!!
Anyway, I do have to agree with you on the creating a separate account thing! You should just be able to login with your Twitter account; the same way you do on TwitPic.
I did some more research. Looks like What the Hashtag is providing a similar concept.
http://wthashta.../WTH:TwitterBot
It allows you to do something like this:
@wthashtag def #austin Disney World Employee killed in monorail accident.
Looks very cool ..i agree
Hehe, another great idea around twitter.
I used to really value trending topics/hashtags but they have lost their edge over the last few months. The system gets gamed too much and I want to check what’s happening NOW, not the three words people say before sex or a popular phrase to win a weekend in Paris!
Twitter should create background organisation, possibly subjects like tech, sport, news, OFF TOPIC
Nice. I’ve already added three definitions for hashtags that weren’t in their database.
But #MrsSlocombe wasn’t spam.