Twitter #Hashtags - CITRT Community
Posted on January 17, 2008
Twitter is a fun site and it revolves around the question ‘What are you doing?’. You have 140 characters to express what you are doing at any given moment, yet it oftentimes turns into a conversation between you and any number of people. When you follow someone, then things that they twitter, or to use the lingo, things that they tweet appear in your own thread. Likewise, others can follow you and things that you tweet appear in their thread. In a unique way, this can become yet another community.
Off and on in the past, I have heard talk of wanting to create a church tech community within Twitter, a place where we can share ideas, ask for help or whatever, but it has never formed into anything that I know of. However, lately there has been discussion about #hashtags.
Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.
Hashtags were developed as a means to create “groupings” on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. The hash symbol is a convention borrowed primarily from IRC channels, and later from Jaiku’s channels.
More info from the site:
A good rule of thumb to follow is to focus on your update first, and only if it quantitatively adds value, to append one-three hashtags. There are no hard and fast rules, but Twitter should continue to be about answering the simple question: “What are you doing” rather than “What tags apply to what you’re doing?”
Over the last several days, a few of us tossed around ideas for what hashtag to use and at one point, we were considering one that was 11 or 12 characters long. My point was that out of 140 characters, 11 or 12 was a big hit to take, so we continued discussing. Somebody then suggested #citrt, to unofficially tie into the Church IT Roundtable that has been created and many of us participate in. It’s brief and to the point, so that is what we agreed on.
So, if you are part of the Twitter community, join in our church IT conversation by first of all following the user named hashtags, then they will follow you. At that point, just start slapping #citrt on the end of your tweet. To track it without participating, go here to the #citrt page and you can listen in on the conversation. You can also go to TerraMinds or TweetScan to search on anything within Twitter.
I don’t know if this is going to last, but I’m willing to give it a shot. So, check out Twitter, follow me, follow hashtags and join in the conversation. You will quickly be following others and they will follow you. There’s a great group of church IT people out here, so come join us.
Links:
- #hashtags
- Terraminds
- TweetScan
- Twitter Fan Wiki
- Twitter Fan Wiki / Hashtags
- hashtags
- jimwalton
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Other posts by Jim Walton
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3 Responses to “Twitter #Hashtags - CITRT Community”
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Jim,
I’m following Hashtags and it’s following me, but my #citrt twitters don’t seem to be getting picked up.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Trace
Hey Trace,
All I know is it did take some time for it to work right for me. I think I twittered it and the hashtags twitterer told me to give it some time. But that was probably less than an hour. I have seen your tweets to #citrt from earlier and don’t see them. You might also tweet directly to hashtags, using @hashtags and ask them.
Maybe I’ll do the same.
Looking to link up with church tech people in twitter and elsewhere….
http://www.twitter.com/dcmusicfusion