The Elegant Awesomeness Of Hashtags
I was going to do a post on the Tory party #cashgordon fiasco but in the topical blogging game it’s ‘you snooze, you lose’ and there’s no way I’d have done anything as good as Meg Pickard’s graph-based analysis anyway.
So instead here is a post about why hashtags are brilliant. Like a lot of social media things I didn’t see the point of them initially but now they’re one of my most beloved things in socialmedialand. Not to use especially - though I’ll join in one if I want - but just the sheer elegance of them. They’re so simple and commonplace that it’s easy to miss the awesomeness coiled up in them, the unintended consequences that have come out of this particular solution to a user experience problem.
Hashtags evolved, as I understand it, because people like tags and Twitter doesn’t support tagging posts. It’s a user-led innovation, not a Twitter-led one. I’ve seen people say they’re badly designed because they take up space in a Tweet, but I don’t agree with this. That introduces a small but real cost (in characters, ergo in information) to using a hashtag, which is probably helpful: it means you can’t freight your post with them and still have it be readable. I also suspect far fewer people would click on, or join in with, tags that were external to the Tweet - they’d have to be more visible and prominent than blog post tags usually are.
And from this comes the first big important difference between hashtags and ordinary tags…
They are invitations: If you see a hashtag and understand what it means, you can use it effectively. You don’t need anyone to be following you, you don’t need to have permission. You just use it - in fact I’d say that hashtagging content is an invitation to use the tag and join in a wider conversation in a way that tagging content generally isn’t: in Flickr terms, say, a hashtag is like a tag and a pool combined into one thing. If you don’t take the invitation, the hashtag remains simply a slice of activity cutting across your Twitter feed. If you do…
They are secret doors: This is what creates the single best thing about hashtags - they are secret doors between parts of the network. Click on a hashtag and you’re exposed to content created by everyone using that hashtag. In an environment where the information that reaches you is defined by your section of the social graph, this is an incredibly important property because it creates a mechanism whereby you can access information easily and quickly outside your usual sources. And for the user the hashtag is a way of potentially summoning that kind of attention, so unlike Twitter search you know with hashtags you’re encountering people open for contact on some level. Like I said, incredibly elegant! Hashtags are wormholes in the social graph.
They collide networks: At a macro level this ‘wormhole’ property can lead to some fascinating effects, as popular hashtags become visible enough to attract external attention or cross over into parts of the network which would never normally be concerned about them. The bafflement over hashtags in trending topics is an example of this - not a very productive one you’d think but hashtags can be a useful corrective to the myopia which comes baked into social-graph-driven social media, the sense that “Twitter users” or “Facebook users” are basically People Like You. Hashtags can also clash networks in the sense that they can form a battleground - a popular political hashtag is usually an excellent way to get up-to-the-minute arguments from most sides in a particular debate.
They are shadow communities: One of the most well-publicised benefits of hashtags is the way they create backchannels - to conferences, TV programmes, sports events: anything that can happen in real time. This isn’t always helpful or pleasant for people involved in those things, but it can be an amazingly exhilarating, rich and content-enhancing experience for users, adding a whole shadow dimension of interactivity which (crucially!) isn’t officially sanctioned. (They’re also, of course, great adverts for events that are taking place.)
They are time machines: This being a blog about research I’d be wrong not to mention the awesomeness as hashtags as an aid to search on a particular topic - not comprehensive, but they create a subset of data which you know is definitely intended to read by interested parties, and one that lends itself to network and conversation analysis: it’s fascinating to compare the “public speech” of the hashtag at a conference (say) with the more informal conversations happening ‘off-tag’ on Twitter.
They are hard to control: Public hashtags are easily hijacked - this makes them a really hard thing for marketers, salesmen, politicians etc to use. It also makes them open to spamming, which is an ongoing problem with popular ones unfortunately. Even though, I think this is a good thing on balance - it means the person or organisation starting a hashtag has no more than nominal control over it, and allows hashtag conversations and usage to feel more ‘free’ and unmoderated than a lot of social media activity.
They are seeds: Not in the sense that you can start conversations using them (though you can - sometimes), but in the purpose they serve. They’re part of a set of simple tools - often bottom-up, user-created tools - that make spreading ideas and information easier. Hashtags are like the seed casings for information on Twitter - simple, resilient packages that make information spread further and faster. And like seeds, they’re a beautifully simple solution to a deep problem. Mechanisms for spreading stuff are commonplace - and a really vital part of social media experience design - but many only help you spread stuff to a defined audience (your own followers/friends). Hashtags go beyond that - I reckon they’re a terrific future model for introducing more serendipity into the social media experience.
