Twitter and new ways to listen
December 20, 2007 – 6:42 amTwo things of particular interest. First, for those who happen to do a lot of twittering, Hashtags.org has launched. Hashtags is something that I’ve seen spoken of frequently for Twitter, so it’s neat to see the steps taken to push Twitter to the next evolutionary phase, so to speak.
Hashtags, if you don’t know, is the inserting of the hash ‘#’ symbol followed by whatever word it is you’re wanting to create as a topic (referred to as a tag). For example, tweeting something like “on my way to california, cant wait to watch the #sharks play” would create the topic “sharks” that anyone can track (and be a part of) on the hashtag website. Multiple word hashes are created by adding a ‘+’ in place of a space. For hashtag tracking to work, you need to be following @hashtags.
Second up, as I was looking at hashtags, I also found Terraminds. Terraminds is a neat engine that allows you to search through public twitter updates (and also find people on twitter). You can also create an rss feed of the results (yay! will probably add this to my Pipes search later).
You should care because if you’re a company, this allows you to follow and find those who are saying meaningful things about your company or product. Want to know how your new product release is going? Chances are people are tweeting about it. If you’re not a company, well, these tools allow you to find and track things that might interest you (or be a creepy stalker, but I condone that a lot less).
