Hashtags Considered #Harmful: “Hashtags Considered #Harmful”

I find this kind of like Google-justification or Facebook-justification for tailored search bubbles.   That gives the “most relevant and popular” results due to the way the cloud operator (twitter in this case) chose to implement the hashtag search.  That doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong, but you may choose to disagree with the way your results are being “curated”.

I’ve used hashtags for search and publication in some cases and they are most useful where frequency is not so high as the outlier of the Superbowl, where community is scattered and not in the “elite” of the twitter verse and most importantly where the context of the tweet cannot necessarily be inferred efficiently without costing too much of the relevant content to be lost in the 127 characters.

Twitter devolves often into popular news and culture because it requires a shared context for the imparting of sufficient information in 127 characters to be of interest.   I also hypothesize this is why app.net has so many rather direct and long-running conversations between pairs and small groups of people, is to have a built-up context that while value can be derived thanks to conversational threading of the newer service, itself requires effort and a lack of “cleanliness” of the baseline micro-broadcast that the author at the New York Times seems to disdain. 

The point isn’t totally invalid although I feel the presentation as with so much modern journalism, throws away, ironically, a lot of context.

(Via Daring Fireball.)