An Introduction to Twitter Hashtags Tagging helps to organize and share our online information with others. By attaching one or more keywords to a Flickr photograph, for example, we group it together with others that have the same tag. Hashtags serve a similar purpose on Twitter , the social micro-blogging service. The aim is to bring some order to Twitter users' published updates ("tweets") and make it easier to follow a topic of interest. And you don't necessarily have to be a Twitter user to get a benefit from hashtags. How to Use Hashtags 1. Follow the @hashtags Twitter user ( http://twitter.com/hashtags ). It will follow you back automatically, and this enables the service to recognize and index your hashtags. [ updated 29 March 2009 : In the year since this post was written, some things have changed -- hashtags have gone from marginal to mainstream, with many more ways to track the tags ( Twitter's finally got itself a good Search function , for o...

Desktop Applications Windows Ada - Ada is the perfect little Twitter app with a clean, simple design. It doesn't hog up your desktop or distract you with a million crazy features. See and send tweets, replies and direct messages. Ada runs on both PCs and MACs. AlertThingy - AlertThingy v2 brings the very latest updates from your favourite social networks direct to your desktop. Plus send Tweets, update your Facebook status, upload photos to Flickr, post to Tumblr and more. With v2 AlertThingy makes it faster and easier to manage the online you. Plus you get the coolest looking RSS reader on the interweb. BigTweet - BigTweet installs as a bookmarklet and allows you to post to Twitter from any web page. Choose a classic 140 character update, or a 240 character tweet. Insert special Unicode characters and shorten URLs with the Bit.ly API right from the bookmarklet window. Automatically capture the current page title, URL and any highlighted text. No registration is required - on...