Twitterers: An introduction to #tags

I felt like I was behind the times yesterday when I noticed this tweet from Chris Messina.

Yum! Boulevard at Mission and Steuart is taaasty! #food #dining

What’s going on with #food and #dining? The Twitterverse quickly set me straight and now I’ll help you to understand!

A similar thing happened earlier in the year when Twitterers started refering to each other like this:

Hey @philmorle, wanna get some lunch with me and @liubinskas

At first this could be seen as a geeky indulgence but as time went on everyone started to do it because it’s such a simple annotation. Then Twitter adopted the concept and started hyperlinking the names like @philmorle to link back to that user’s timeline and introduced new concepts such as Replys. At this point a very very simple idea becomes a powerful way to organise unstructured data and to make it actionable… I can do things with it.

So, now we are seeing the start of something new that is equally simple and potentialy very powerful. Where the @ prefix identifies a person, the # prefix identified a tag or category. Let’s look at Chris’ tweet again:

Yum! Boulevard at Mission and Steuart is taaasty! #food #dining

He’s sown a seed that can one day be watered by Twitter or developers using the Twitter API. Then we’ll see:

Yum! Boulevard at Mission and Steuart is taaasty! #food #dining

The hyperlinked tags link to other tweets that refer to food and dining. Doing this in the context of your own social network is particularly powerful. In my case, all the people I follow in Twitter live in a place I spend lots of time so clicking on #food in my network should suggest some great places to to try.

Here’s some more examples:

To enter Karazhan, you need to do a string of quests to get a working key. Starts with Archmage Alturus (48,76) of Violet Eye just outside Karazhan. #warcrafttips

@loic just told us all about a new time travelling API from Google #leweb3

Now I can find all the tweets about Le Web 3 conference and World of Warcraft cheats with one click.

It just keeps getting more useful. Other applications can use the Twitter API to extract #tags and discover trends, create mashups with other services with tags, and so on.

So if you are wondering what the # marks are in my timeline… now you know.

Thanks @lachlanhardy and @cameronreilly for starting me on the road to understanding.

Geeks that want to dig deeper, check out these links:

• http://microformats.org/wiki/twitter-nanoformats
• http://microformats.org/wiki/picoformats

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