microsyntax

one must first know the rules to break them

This is a rather hyperbolic statement but Twitter is probably one of the most fascinating emergent communication and collaboration platforms i’ve come across since writing. communication and collaboration on twitter is very much an emergent, dynamic, and uniquely colored by the individual’s experience.

Hashtags emerged some time ago as a way for people to indicate keywords in their tweets, metadata if you like. Usage was simple, just put a # before any word and it became a #hashtag. Search engines could filter through the noise for # and find metadata about the tweets. This works well for custom words that you want to create on the fly, but what strikes me is there is an opportunity for sets of letters or codes that have meaning in of themselves without the need for that additional character of the hash tag.