Posts Tagged ‘moonfruit’
What The Hashtag: Your Guide To Enigmatic Twitter Hashtags
There’s been a lot of chatter recently about the reliability of Twitter’s trending topics and how to make sense of hashtags. Hashtags are words preceded by a “#” which denote what the Tweet is about and makes it easier to search for Tweets about specific topics and events. This weekend’s “Moonfruit” and “GorillaPenis” trending topics on Twitter were examples of trending topics that aren’t easily recognizable and aren’t current events. Personally, I find trending topics and hashtags to be confusing at times because there’s little context surround them on Twitter. And many of the Trending Topics aren’t necessarily breaking news and is often polluted by spam. What The Hashtag is a site launched to solve this exact problem.
What The Hashtag provides detailed definitions and context of hashtags and trending topics on Twitter. But what makes the site even more interesting is that it provides hashtag use stats, top contributors to a particular hashtag, real-time hashtag stream monitoring, and charts. For example, the entry for the hashtag #moonfruit has a graph charting the frequency of the hashtag in Tweets sent out in a given time period, a detailed description of the context behind the Moonfruit, how many Tweets included Moonfruit (443,217) and a real-time stream of Tweets with the Moonfruit hashtag.
What The Hashtag reports that it has analyzed and tracked 2,775 hashtags since its launch in February 2009. So far the site has 800 registered users (registration needed for detailed info entry; simple definitions can be submitted without account). The site is adding the ability to Tweet from the site and opening up its API in the near future.
What The Trend, which we reviewed here, is a fairly similar service that also makes sense of trending topics and hashtags on Twitter. The two services have many of the same features but a few differences. What The Trend pulls in news stories and photos about trending topics, but doesn’t include some of the analytics and graphing that What The Hasthag offers. It appears that What The Hashtag’s details goes more in-depth with the detailed descriptions and stats, but both sites are pretty useful when trying to make sense of Twitter’s enigmatic Trending Topics.
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Mother Teresa, MLK, The Dalai Lama And Twitter. All But One Have A Nobel Peace Prize…So Far
Remember a few weeks ago when we wrote about former Deputy National Security Advisor Mark Pfeifle saying that the founders of Twitter should get the Nobel Peace Prize? Most everyone thought it was just a half-serious comment made on the fly. But it turns out, Pfeifle wasn’t joking. At all.
In an op-ed today in the Christian Science Monitor, Pfeifle lays out exactly why he thinks Twitter should get the prize. His argument is that without Twitter, the world would have had basically no insight into what was going on inside of Iran during the protests that broke out following the country’s controversial election. Specifically, he says that the story of Neda Agha-Soltan, the woman in Iran whose death was captured on video, wouldn’t have gotten out without the aid of Twitter. “Neda became the voice of a movement; Twitter became the megaphone,” is how Pfeifle puts it.
He continues, “When traditional journalists were forced to leave the country, Twitter became a window for the world to view hope, heroism, and horror. It became the assignment desk, the reporter, and the producer. And, because of this, Twitter and its creators are worthy of being considered for the Nobel Peace Prize.”
While the idea of Twitter getting the same prize that Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King Jr. have all received may sound utterly absurd, when you think about it, it’s really not that bad of a point. It’s just kind of ridiculous to think of a web startup with that silly of a name getting the prize. But there is no denying the impact Twitter had in spreading information about that situation. Of course, if that spreading of information ends up mattering at all in the long run, is another story.
And, as Ashu points out in the comments, it’s kind of ridiculous that Gandhi never got the award, but Twitter might.
When he originally said it (video embedded below), Pfieifle indicated that Twitter should be considered for the prize because they postponed a planned maintenance to allow the communication surround the Iran situation to continue. Awarding a Nobel Peace Prize for the rescheduling of site maintenance remains absurd. But Pfeifle has a much better argument now.
A Facebook page has also been created to try to get Twitter the prize. Perhaps next year someone can nominate Facebook for hosting the page that helped get Twitter the prize.
[thanks James]
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