Scott Porad

Some background on @ and #

On Twitter, the “at sign“, @, is used to represent a user. For example, my username on Twitter is “scottporad” which is customarily written as “@scottporad” (quotes excluded).

On Twitter a given user, such as myself, can either have “followers” or be “following”. Followings are other users, e.g. @barackobama, whose updates I subscribe to, and followers are users who subscribe to my updates. In Twitter nomenclature, updates are called “tweets”.

Also, on Twitter, the “hash“, #, is used to associate a specific tweet as with a topic or subject matter. In the language of Twitter, this is referred to as a “hashtag“. For example, if a given user, such as myself, was going to post about puppy dogs, I might add the hashtag “#puppydogs” (quotes excluded) to my tweet.

There is no governance for hashtags. In other words, any arbitrary word or string of characters prepended by a hash is considered a hashtag. Using my previous example, I could have alternatively chosen to add the hashtag #puppy or #dogs or all three (like so: “my puppy is so adorable #puppy #puppydogs #dogs”) and my tweet would be associated with all three hashtags.  

Subscribing to the tweets from a particular user is relatively straightforward—a core feature of Twitter is the ability to follow other users. To follow @barackobama, login to Twitter, visit http://twitter.com/barackobama, and click “Follow”.

On the other hand, following the tweets related to a particular hashtag is not as well defined. There is no consensus mechanism by which it can be done, and many people are trying to solve this problem (including myself at http://ctwee.net).  hashtags.org is, to my knowledge, the earliest and the most well known attempt.

Why @ is Old School

Twitter is about to explode in popularity and become relatively mainstream. To anybody who has observed online social media over the years, this is obvious. Just like before there was Twitter there was Facebook and before that MySpace (and, I suppose, ultimately, before that, e-mail) and after Twitter there will be something else and something else again.

Many of these earlier social media provided something that did not exist in the world before. However, from my point of view, the @ is nothing more than yet another incarnation of broadcast media, like television, radio or newspapers. The followers that a user has is their audience; the number of followers is the user’s reach, and the user’s tweets is the content that they broadcast.

In theory, it’s a different type of broadcast medium (perhaps “social broadcast media”) because the audience is supposed to be based on social connections. However, as Twitter is gaining in popularity we see a growing number of users who are trying to amass large audiences without regard to any sort of social connection. “Audience builders” can use Twitter’s public timeline and API to identify and attract followers, and have developed a number of techniques based to growth their numbers of followers.

Some Twitter users have amassed large amounts of followers because they genuinely appeal to a mass audience. For example, at the very top of the “follower leaderboard”, so to speak, are users like @cnn and @barackobama who have more 500,000 followers. (I Can Has Cheezburger?, @ichcheezburger, has about 290,000. Of course, we have an audience of millions on our site daily.)

On the other hand, a user who does not genuinely have mass appeal can generate audiences in the tens of thousands within a matter of months by putting forth some effort and using techniques like I mentioned above.

While these are not gigantic audiences in either case, keep in mind that Twitter is still nascent…just wait until Twitter hits the mainstream.

Why @ is Killing Twitter

Why is this happening? To me, it’s clear: like any other broadcast medium, an audience has value. If I have X followers, then I can charge Y to broadcast a message to my audience. What we are currently experiencing on Twitter is a “land rush” to gain audience share before the medium reaches saturation.

At present, the commercial exchange is not typically a quid pro quo like I’ve described above. Rather, the value of the audience is realized through perceived influence. In other words, if I have a lot of followers then it appears that I have a lot of influence because I can broadcast to these people. It’s a simple step to trade on that perception as a leading online influencer; one way or another, a user with many followers will be able to convert that follower count into money. You can take that to the bank.

In my view, this dynamic is killing Twitter. Or, if not slowly killing it outright, then diluting it’s value as a social medium. That is, as Audience Builders continue to dominate Twitter the “social” is being stripped away from the “social medium”. Of course, to be fair, there is some value in broadcast, but we already have many mechanisms for that ranging from smoke signals to radio, television and print.

[There's a counter argument here is analogous to e-mail and spam. In other words, technologies will outwit the spammers, and as they do the spammers will ebb because the returns are diminishing. I don't know...Google does a good job of filtering my spam, but that hasn't deterred the spammers yet because I still get hundreds per day in my spam folder.]

Why # is Transformational

On the other hand, my view is that the # in Twitter offers a transformational opportunity for social media. That is, the # can create social connections between people through the media that no other social media has created previously.* In other words, if Twitter were less about the @ and more about the # it could really be something special, as opposed to just a more better version of smoke signals.

Let’s remind ourselves about the #: the # represents a particular topic and any user can associate their tweet with a particular topic through a hashtag. In my view, this has some very important implications.

First, and in my view, foremost, the set of users who have associated a tweet with a hashtag represent a set of users with a common interest. This interest may be broad, like #puppydogs, or narrow, like #puppydogs #forsale #seattle. Another way to think of this set of users is a community of people who, if put in the same room, would have something in common to talk about.

Second, any user can broadcast to the set of users who are interested in any topic by associating their tweet with a hashtag. This totally levels the playing field in terms of broadcasting. If you think about broadcast media, the entities that controlled the means of broadcasting were gatekeepers. Television and networks. Books and publishers. And so on.

Or, with Twitter it’s @’s and followers. But, the # ends that restriction. There is no gatekeeper if I want to broadcast to all the people who are interested in puppy dogs for sale in Seattle. All I need to do is associate my tweet with #puppydogs #forsale #seattle. (And, of course, people who are interested in #puppydogs #forsale #seattle need to have tools to view the tweets associated with that topic. As mentioned previously, the tools are currently rudimentary.)

And, finally, there is no barrier to entry in terms of community membership. A user implicitly joins a community by associating a specific hashtag with one of their tweets.

Could # Save Twitter?

I will conclude with the assertion that the # could be Twitter’s savior. In abstract sense, I think it could, but to do so would amount to a enormous change in mindset and tools.

From a mindset perspective, the online global consciousness will need to recast Twitter as a social medium for empowering people to communicate with other people who have similar interests. As opposed to the current view of Twitter which more akin to a social network.

And, from a tool perspective, the ecosystem of developers creating tools around the flow of tweets through Twitter reoriented their tools around # as opposed to @. Why they should do this is clear…

…tool developers are driven for two reasons: curiosity and money. Ctwee.net was originally built because I was curious about the communities of people surrounding a given hashtag. I simply wanted to know if Twitter’s API would allow me to construct the community of users around a given topic (i.e. hashtag). (Shout out to @markpuck for working with me to build Ctwee.net.)

From there, it didn’t take much imagination to realize that there is quite a bit of commercial opportunity once it was known who belonged to what communities. I do not need to elaborate on this point…just think about it for a few moments and you’ll quickly see dollar signs. And, as such, I believe there should be ample opportunity for tool developers to provide services that are # oriented.**

Thanks to @micah for reviewing a draft of this post.

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* – Actually, perhaps Usenet and IRC were the original #. In some ways, the # on Twitter is just a mashup of Usenet and IRC.

** – Of course, let’s look at Usenet once again: once they do, will the spammers find yet another way to ruin it. If so, is it reasonable to conclude that spammers are like water, the Internet is like concrete and social media are cracks in the pavement…the spammers will always find their way into them?