How to use hashtags on Twitter

12:51 PM 10/8/10

I'm thinking about Twitter, and I'm trying to understand how and why to use tags. Now that I'm thinking about it, it applies to blogging and also to Flickr (or any photo site with tags) as well.

Twitter said that you could use tags in this situation: You write a tweet that says something like, 'That's cool!' or 'I loved it!' and nobody knows what you're talking about. You would put a tag that says #AmericanIdol to show you were talking about American Idol.

This is kind of a pain in the ass and I think people would be too lazy to do it. If you're too lazy to put the words 'American Idol' directly in the sentence, then you're too lazy to write a hashtag that says #americanidol.

You might do it if you could copy-paste easily. If something was already written there when you were typing your reply, you might use it.

But if tags would appear automatically, like frequently used tags, or if they had autofill, so that you would start typing a hashmark and it would fill in the rest of the word for you, then they might get used. You would type #am... and it will fill in 'americanidol' for you.

I like Twitter's simplicity. *I hate clutter.* Which is why I dislike Facebook and MySpace. Facebook is this huge, bulky program that takes five minutes to download on dialup. It takes a long time to open facebook pages even if you have a high bandwidth connection. Twitter is simple and basic and lightweight. I've decided that I like 'mobile' websites for this reason... however, as phones get smarter and faster and they get more memory, 'mobile' websites won't be lean and light anymore, and they'll get bulkier and full of garbage and clutter just like ordinary web pages are.

So any kind of 'feature,' like autocompleting tags, adds bulkiness to a simple web page, and I don't like that. So I'm not asking for that feature to be added. Instead, I'm wondering why you would use tags, what's the best situation to use them in, and so on.

*******
The difference between facebook and twitter - I wanted to write about that... postponing it for now. On Facebook, you can listen to the status updates of your 'friends.' On Twitter, you can listen to anybody's status updates if they're not 'protected.' You can look at other people's facebook pages, but it's hard to set it up to automatically feed them to you unless they're your friends. On Facebook, you can't search for a topic that people are talking about. On Twitter, searching for a specific topic is the whole point.

Twitter is adding more clutter: you will be able to see images and other types of files attached to tweets.
******

Anyway, how and why would you use tags?

In photos, like on Flickr, it's obvious what tags are doing. It's an image. You can't search for it. You have to use words to describe what it is. It's a face, a child, a person, it's a specific color. People often use tags like 'blue, purple,' etc on Flickr for the overall colors of a picture.

There are infinity tags that can describe anything. You have to choose which ones you feel are most important. You could tag a picture of a child: human, homo sapiens, alive, animal, boy, peach colored, caucasian, happy, smile, eyes, twenty-first century, american, t-shirt, running, ... it goes on forever. There are no rules about which tags to use, except that you can get an impression of what tags other people think are useful. It never occurred to me that people would want tags for a color, like purple, but apparently people need those. They want to pick photos that fit a certain color scheme.

In a blog, you're writing in words, so it's possible to do a word search in the blog. That's similar to Twitter. It's less obvious why you would want to use tags for a blog when you can already search in the words.

However, sometimes there is a general idea, a main idea, something that you didn't say in the words. All of my blogs about Curtis are about love and relationships, but I don't always use the word 'love' or 'relationships' when I'm talking about him. They could also be tagged 'rejection,' but that's where I start putting my interpretations on it and it might not be accurate (it's actually 'fear of rejection' more than rejection), since most of my writing is about how he's not talking to me and he's not part of my life and we're not friends and I don't get to see him. (And I don't ask to see him very aggressively, because of the fear of rejection.)

Tags aren't always true. They could be somebody's interpretation, and you can disagree with that interpretation. They could be irrelevant and not useful. Let's say I wanted to find pictures of children, but instead I got a bunch of pictures of toys. Somebody might think that 'children' is a useful tag to put on pictures of children's toys, but I disagree. Yes, it vaguely has to do with children, but if I want to see pictures of children, I don't want to see toys. That's just an imaginary example, I don't know if anyone did that for real.

I seem to remember something on Flickr where I was looking for the tag 'people,' and somebody put in pictures of architecture and buildings under the tag 'people,' because architecture is something created by human beings, and so it has to do with people, instead of, for instance, trees and plants. It's true, architecture is connected to people more strongly than a forest or an ocean. But I'm thinking that I will actually see people in the photo. And actually, by that argument, you can tag 'people' on a picture of a forest, if people are planning to cut down the forest, or if people are exploring the forest, or if it's a forest that a lot of people love to visit. That means it has something to do with people. Same goes for the ocean, or outer space.

****
On Twitter, you're making a very short comment. I can understand the need for a tag in the 'That's awesome!' kind of tweet, where nobody can figure out *what* is awesome. Or if you make a short comment about the nature of love, but you don't use the word 'love' anywhere in your sentences. Or the tag 'harassment' when you are describing the noises that the attackers are making in your house. (Or when I write blogs about 'telling the truth,' I could put the tag 'self-improvement' or 'integrity' or some other virtue. I just glanced at my blog again.) The hashtag, the hash symbol #, shows that it's not part of the sentence, so you won't be confused about the grammar. You won't read it into the sentence.

Maybe I will go look at Twitter again and get a feel for how other people are using tags. Sometimes I disagree with them. Maybe I could see why I disagree.

It might help to imagine 'what life was like without hashtags.' Then I could understand the need for them.