Comments on: Tagalus: Hashing through Twitter hashtags… and testing OAuth too

By: Tagalus: 10,000 Twitter hashtags defined and counting | Oregon Startup Blog

Tagalus: 10,000 Twitter hashtags defined and counting | Oregon Startup Blog — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 18:48:11 +0000

[...] since early 2009, one site has been working to change that. Well, at least by providing some insight into that whole [...]

By: Tagalus: 10,000 Twitter hashtags defined and counting « Silicon Florist

Tagalus: 10,000 Twitter hashtags defined and counting « Silicon Florist — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:16:14 +0000

[...] since early 2009, one site has been working to change that. Well, at least by providing some insight into that whole [...]

By: John Nastos

John Nastos — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 01:41:29 +0000

For anyone wandering through this post in the future, Tagalus now has an API and an embeddable widget – see http://blog.tagal.us/api-documentation/ and http://blog.tagal.us/2009/03/tagalus-widget/

By: Jeff

Jeff — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:48:28 +0000

I was just thinking about this and thought I’d come back and post another comment.

I guess hash tagging and Tagalus are necessary because Twitter provides no context in Tweets. As opposed to CitySpeek.com that has message categories and groups, both of which provide additional context while keeping a message within 140 characters.

Okay, I’m done with the self promotion…

By: Tagalus featured on the Silicon Florist « Tagalus Blog

Tagalus featured on the Silicon Florist « Tagalus Blog — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:46:33 +0000

[...] to Rick Turoczy for his fabulous writeup of Tagalus in his Portland/NW-tech blog the Silicon [...]

By: Steven Walling

Steven Walling — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:32:43 +0000

Hashtags have never exactly been rocket science once you dive in and use them, but I really love Tagalus because it makes hashtagging far more accessible and even a bit more fun. The ability to interact with the site through a reply is ridiculously nice.

As a project, I think tagalus is pretty innovative because rather than just making another client or ranking system, it builds a practical independent resource out of a social function that the Twitter community already uses.

By: John Nastos

John Nastos — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:31:37 +0000

Jeff,

You are completely correct that there are times where hashtagging something doesn’t give you any advantages. However, when looking at the trending topics on Twitter, there are usually plenty of tags that are acronyms (think #IP5), or events (#wordcampdx), or ideas (#getoffmylawn) that make something like @tagalus be useful. I built it after trying to search through Twitter to find the meaning of the more obscure tags and having no luck – hopefully @tagalus can start to solve that admittedly niche problem.

By: Shai Berger

Shai Berger — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:48:33 +0000

Jeff: Say you define a hashtag “#of” regarding say “Outdoor Foosball”. Searching for “of” will be useless.

More realistically: If I want news about the company I search for #apple, and I won’t get tweets about people eating apples.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:04:24 +0000

Cool to see more stuff coming out of Portlaned. However, I personally thing that hashtags are mostly pointless. The Twitter search engine (and any other search engine for that matter) doesn’t need the “#” to index a tweet. From what I can tell, it doesn’t aid at all in keyword searching.

The only advantage for hashtagging is the rare event when a tweet doesn’t contain a key word (like your above mentioned getoffmylawn example).

I don’t know, maybe I am just an old grumpy man on this one, but it just seems to be much-a-do-about-nothing.

Get off my lawn!