@alexmuller recently blogged about the misuse of twitter hashtags. You should read his post. In it he argues that people overuse hashtags on twitter. I agree that that they are often overused, but I believe that this is only occurring when people tag a tweet with a tag which has little to do with the tweet’s actual content. Alex holds that most of the time when someone tags a word in a tweet that could be accurately searched for anyway, it is a misuse of the #hashtag convention.

I first wrote this post as a reply to his blog post, but it was a bit longer than I intended and I have written nothing here in the recent past.

I disagree with him for two main reasons.

Firstly, good twitter clients make hash tags into links to a twitter search for the hash tagged word. Tweet deck is a good example (and if you haven’t migrated to it from Twitterrific yet, you should at least try it). This is obviously a convenience factor, and an easy way of directing people to an existing conversation on a topic. Remember that the @ tag started as a user meme which was eventually incorporated into the actual service.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, hashtags are usually how people show that the mentioned tag is the main point of their tweet. So, even if the search function would give the same result, a hashtag allows me to quickly see that a word is not just mentioned in passing.

Tangentially, hashtags have now become a meme/convention. To not use them is to allow your message to be lost in the unsearched ether as there are now plenty of tools which search for only #hashtags – especially notably hashtags.org. Whether or not you like that this has happened, it is now the case. It seems silly to ignore it.

Does anyone else have an opinion?