The Death of # on Twitter
Twitter is growing up. The Summize acquisition was a big move towards consolidating the service and advancing Twitter towards the mainstream.
I wanted to take a moment to address the state of Hashtags among mainstream Twitter users, and determine if there is still enough value to keep them alive, or consider retiring the use of ‘#’ on Twitter.
I have a ton of respect for Chris Messina, Nate Ritter, and Stowe Boyd, and everything they’ve done with Hashtags. But I think the time has come to have a conversation challenging the usefulness of Hashtags and see how the service could evolve to meet the needs of Twitter’s changing user base.
First of all, there are four main benefits of Hashtags listed on Twitter fan wiki and subsequent sites:
(1) a consolidated directory of conversations on Twitter, sorted by metadata
(2) increased utility for the track feature (which is no longer useful since Twitter disabled ‘Track’)
(3) graphing popularity of topics
(4) giving posts context and meaning
In the era Twitter 2.0, which I define as Twitter + Summize, you have a much more unified community. This sort of centralization has been very good for the service. But I feel that Hashtags have led to the very fragmentation that plagued Twitter 1.0.
Here is a search of ‘podcamp boston‘ on Twitter:
You’ll notice that you get a much more rich set of search results than if you searched ‘#PCB3‘ which is the hashtag used for the event.
We see that ‘PCB3‘ gives us better results by dropping the ‘#’
Because ‘PCB3′ yields better results than ‘#PCB3′ is this proof the hashtag is dying?
More conversations can be found on Twitter search using a common keyword, than can be found searching for hashtags.
Consider these Tweets:
This tweet would get the most attention because more people search ‘barcamp san diego’ than any other hashtag.
This tweet would get the second most attention because it is still more popular than searching for hashtags, but not as popular as ‘barcamp san diego’.
This tweet uses the official hashtag but doesn’t get as much attention because most people don’t know to look for it. People are looking for ‘barcamp san diego’ or ‘barcampsd’ and this doesn’t show up to the majority of users. Not to mention you are duplicating your references to barcamp which isn’t ideal in such a limited space.
This is probably the most efficient use of hashtags, but still does not reach the broadest audience because hashtags aren’t understood (or searched) by the majority.
This conversation fragmentation isn’t good for Twitter because it confuses their users and doesn’t provide much value for those who use it. The disadvantages are now outweighing the advantages.
With that being said, I am not suggesting Hashtags should be retired altogether, but rather kill the ‘#’ sign and just index every keyword on Twitter. What would be wrong with that? We’d get all the benefits of Hashtags.org and more, because we’d drastically lower the learning curve, meaning more people could adopt this aspect of the service.
We are also seeing an explosion of brand awareness on Twitter, which is leading to more and more products, apps, and brands wanting to represent themselves with an actual account (@TheirBrand), rather than via hashtag (#TheirBrand). What is more useful, searching ‘@Starbucks‘ or ‘#Starbucks‘? Personally, I think searching ‘@Starbucks’ yields better results because those are the Tweets we know Starbucks is listening to and responding.
The fact is, the majority of people aren’t using Hashtags and probably never will. If people simply wrote their tweets in proper context (which is more likely than using Hashtags), there would be no need for the use of metadata in your status updates.
Not only are hashtags confusing for the next generation Twitter adopter, but they cause unnatural keyword permutations and diminish, not enrich, Twitter search results. Therefore, I feel there is a major reinvention needed to how we think about Hashtags, in order to make Hashtags.org useful again.
The ‘#’ is not dying, it is just being consolidated with ‘@’ and Twitter Search is doing the heavy lifting.
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