While I don’t generally use hashtags, I have followed some storeis like blogger social using them, only because I was not well enough to be there and my spouse and daughter went to represent me for the Frozen Pea Fund. So hashtags were useful and being a practical sort - normally - I took advantage of that.

In other ways I’m a purist however, and don’t add many extras to tweets. Though I follow hashtag users, I can see both sides of the issue.

On that note, an interesting part of the hashtags question is that you’ve stated your case in a very thoughtful drama-free piece of writing, yet the twitterverse tends to take issues and blow them up into dramas. It will be interesting to follow this - and you.

Scott: A better analogy might be if inline links had to be splayed out after the text they are hidden under, or if the tags we use to categorize our blog entries had to be inserted inline. Hashtags are often tacked on to tweets as additional metadata. When you only have 140 characters to work with, my personal preference is that they all remain available for the text rather than meta-text.

As far as Terraminds being down, there are plenty of other services that can be used — Tweetscan is one good example. I also don’t see how hashtags eliminate the multi-meaning problem you point to. That’s endemic to tagging systems in general. If I tagged a tweet #hotdog I could be talking about a warm canine or a delicious sausage or a showoff. The hashtag system can’t solve for that any more than Tweetscan can.

For me, i’s not a question of hashtags not having merit, it’s a question of the uniqueness of their merit not outweighing what they do to Twitter and the relationship between me and my fellow Tweeters.

How is changing the typography any less distracting than a single symbol that’s not commonly used?

The fact of the matter is, it arose out of necessity, and has become a convention we’ve grown accustomed to, as you can easily do with hashtags.

BTW, Terraminds is closed down. And the problem with using search-based tools is when words have multiple meanings, particularly as a proper name. Every tweet that contains “austin”, for example, may not refer to Austin, Texas.

I’m not saying hashtags are the best solution, just a) that I think people can become accustomed to them, as they have with HTML hyperlinks, and b) that the solutions you’ve proposed don’t solve the problem either.

Seeing the hash inline in a message can add a bit of cognitive noise, but so do LOLisms and *other forms* of imparting additional meaning. It’s a bit like formatting an email. I don’t auto-delete emails from people who have ugly email stationary, even though its’ totally obnoxious to me.

Hey, so I requested a follow, but you’ll prolly just unfollow bc I use hashtags a bit.