CNET - By adding a single character to Twitter's vocabulary nearly four years ago -- # -- Chris Messina unlocked a wealth of useful information in Twitter.
Now he wants to bring the same creation, called a hashtag, to Google+.
Hashtags are terms beginning with the pound sign, also called a hash, for easy identification as a recognizable label. Examples include #wwc hashtag for women's World Cup soccer or the ever-popular #fail hashtag for complaining when things go wrong. By following a particular hashtag, it can be easier to concentrate on content you might be interested in.
Messina sees hashtags as, ideally, a way that people can sift their Google+ "stream"--the collection of posts from all people a Google+ user follows.
"Lots of people have requested the ability to target content [to] their followers based on topic (i.e. only share content to people who are following me AND interested in, say, comics). Since the product doesn't support that kind of targeting, I'm just making something up, like I did with hashtags back in 2007," Messina said in a Google+ post last week. But so far it's a manual process: "So, if you see 3 to 4 topic hashtags at the beginning of my posts (like subject lines but for topics), they're there so people can choose to ignore my post if they're uninterested."
Now he wants to bring the same creation, called a hashtag, to Google+.
Hashtags are terms beginning with the pound sign, also called a hash, for easy identification as a recognizable label. Examples include #wwc hashtag for women's World Cup soccer or the ever-popular #fail hashtag for complaining when things go wrong. By following a particular hashtag, it can be easier to concentrate on content you might be interested in.
Messina sees hashtags as, ideally, a way that people can sift their Google+ "stream"--the collection of posts from all people a Google+ user follows.
"Lots of people have requested the ability to target content [to] their followers based on topic (i.e. only share content to people who are following me AND interested in, say, comics). Since the product doesn't support that kind of targeting, I'm just making something up, like I did with hashtags back in 2007," Messina said in a Google+ post last week. But so far it's a manual process: "So, if you see 3 to 4 topic hashtags at the beginning of my posts (like subject lines but for topics), they're there so people can choose to ignore my post if they're uninterested."
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