Littera Deusto

Modern Languages, Basque Studies and Humanities

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Twitter and hashtags.

noviembre 20th, 2010 · No hay Comentarios

Nowadays, we are in the century of information. People have more information than ever. While citizens get information, there is an important process that has to be done, which is called communication. The World Wide Web has change the way we communicate. Websites like Twitter or Facebook are becoming more and more important and they are helping in that sense of improving how human beings communicate. Around 500 million people use Facebook and 200 million people use Twitter. On the following lines, it will be explained the website Twitter and specifically, one of  important tools which is hashtags.

Twitter helps people from all over the world to communicate. It has many advantages, for example, you can use it wherever you are and at any time. Users in this site communicate by tweets which are the texts that one person send to the others. This texts or tweets can only have 140 characters. Twitter has been evolving since it was launched in 2006. One of its most important improvements has been hashtags. Hashtags are used by users among other things to create groups that discuss about the same topic. Moreover, this tool gives more metadata and context to the tweets.

Using hashtags is very simple. You only have to type the # symbol followed by the tag you are going to talk about in your  tweet.  This  will  redirect your tweet to the site where all the members of  Twitter are commenting  on that issue.Many times the hashtag you will type would have already been created by another member before. That is why it is recommended to investigate before the most important hashtags of the website.

Hashtag symbol

 Hashtags can be used to many things. For instance, Chris Messina, who is an important designer and advocate for the open web, was the first man that said that people could use tweets to co-ordinate actions when a natural disaster happened. This was done, for example, in Haiti’s disaster or San Diego’s one.  Other uses of hashtags are  to know which are the trending topics of the time (#Wikileaks) ,to express the intent of the post (#ironic) or keep track of an ongoing conversation. 

Nonprofiteers are specially rewarded with this system because they can discuss about different themes with everybody. Moreover, Users do not need to be signed in Twitter to follow the most trending topics. They can go to hashtag.org and follow there all the comments on the issue they are interested in. Finally, it has to be said that hashtags have to be used carefully and with good intentions, if not they become useless. Do not use them like spam and it is recommended to use the #CamelCase where the initials of the words are capitalized to the better understanding of the tags. Do not hesitate to follow the #rdf1011 hashtag where themes covering internet, information and digital resources are commented.

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