Different Uses for Twitter Hashtags

Hamburg.
The next speaker at ECREA 2010 is Jonathan Hickman, whose interest is in #hashtags on Twitter. Hashtags are a simple way for Twitter users to organise their conversations, by putting the ‘#’ symbol in front of words to make tweets on specific topics more easily searchable (e.g. #iranelection). The hashtag is a form of metadata in that it describes the content of the tweets. This is part of a wider practice of tagging in computer-mediated content; tags are widely used for a wide variety of online materials.

However, there are also problems with this, as these tags are user-generated (and thus examples of folksonomies), and may not necessarily be consistent; this conference, for example, can be found on Twitter under the hashtags #ECC10, #ECC2010, or #ECREA2010… In this, they are different from hierarchically coordinated taxonomies.

So why tag texts? In the first place, perhaps to facilitate data retrieval; texts are encountered on an individual level, and tags allow them to be compiled and collated. Are hashtags a special case of tagging, then? Perhaps they do something slightly different from tags in other spaces; they can be used to compile tweets on specific topics, and when Twitter started to use hashtags officially, a feedback loop was created that encourages more users to use them.

When following a hashtag, users begin following a topic rather than merely their own network; this means that they’re now able to encounter tweets by users from outside their network, and this bridges an important structural gap on Twitter. Indeed, in some cases, hashtags are now pre-arranged to bring together topics and users who are interested in specific events; the BBC now inserts hashtags into the opening credits of some shows to encourage people to tweet.

Jonathan’s case study concerns the #ESM conference hashtag, which involved some 20 users (including himself); interestingly, this turned into a territorial fight over who owned the #ESM hashtag, as the same tag was already used by a number of other groups (some of whom had ‘registered’ their version of the hashtag on unofficial hashtag sites). Further slides continued with more jocular tweets around the same theme. In this case, hashtags are no longer folksonomic – but become a different part of the conversation itself.