Twitter: Separating content from Hashtag Meta data

Okay, so I don’t normally go in for these ultra geeky posts but I think I have thought up a really helpful solution to tagging tweets in Twitter without disrupting the regular flow of a conversational tweet. I have been intrigued by the use of hashtags in twitter to store snapshots and ideas that may be called up in the future, for instance #idea. But I am with Dave Couston when it comes to hashtag use. I absolutely detest the thought of annoying people with something that is only meant for my own consumption, or the consumption of a small party of people involved in a unique hashtag.

So hopefully I have found a solution. I have setup a further twitter account @rapley_tagged, which will contain purely Meta data relative to the normal flow of conversation in my regular @kevin_rapley account. These are linked together by the @rapley_tagged using a syntax of “@kevin_rapley #hashtag1 #hashtag2 #hashtag3 http://tinyurl.com/code” where @kevin_rapley lets anyone who stumbles across these tweets see what they’re related to, the hashtags being whatever data I wish to attach to a tweet and the tiny URL linking directly to that tweet.

This separates content from Meta data very effectively, okay it isn’t quite so quickly readable when I go back to track an #idea hashtag and need to click through to the actual tweet to read but I can put up with that. I can put up with that when I am able to fit more content into the 140 character limit of the content tweet and also more space for hashtags in the Meta data tweets. Plus I am not alienating and annoying followers of my regular twitter account. Twitter wasn’t built for containing Meta data, but I am sure this is the best work around for extending Twitter into something it isn’t.

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Tags: hash tags, hashtags, twitter

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 10:17 pm and is filed under twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.