Um…
Why can’t I just follow #hashtags in Twitter like they were @users?
English translation: Twitter lets anyone toss their transient thoughts into the ether for anyone in the universe to listen in on. This is useful if you know of people who say interesting things. You can subscribe to such people — many of them — and then conveniently track their utterances over the course of the day. And this can be very interesting indeed. It is like being on the listening end of a cocktail party conversation where the other person says something that makes you pause and go, “huh!” (*) Serendipity happens several times a day, and it becomes addictive.
The problem is that you only every hear from people you already know of and to whom you have already subscribed or followed. If someone you don’t know of says something brilliant about something you care about (say, cats or Madonna or product vision) you won’t hear about it unless you go out of your way to search for it.
To help identify the topic of their dispatches into the Ether, Twitter users have taken to appling keywords (a.k.a. tags) to them. But Twitter doesn’t officially support keywords or tags. So people make up their own and tack them into their 140 character Twitter message. By convention, to identify the tag as such, they start them with the hash symbol (#) and call them hashtags. Hashtags look like #cats or #madonna or #productvision.
The problem is you cannot subscribe to hashtag traffic directly, as you subscribe to people. (You can subscribe to the RSS feed for the hashtag, which means going use another program. The benefits of centralization and serendipity are lost.
So I repeat:
Um…
Why can’t I just follow #hashtags in Twitter like they were @users?
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*This doesn’t apply if the people you follow insist on telling you about their flight delays or what they just ingested.
