We all know what hashtags are now, right? It’s a word, or a small phrase with no spaces between the words with a hashtag (to you older folks, or those who aren’t into social media, that would be the pound sign on your telephone) preceding it. You can typically find these hashtags in social media platforms, mainly on Twitter.
But if you already use Twitter, and you already know what a hashtag is, and how to use it, you will find that uncovering the meaning of some of them will be getting much easier from this point on. The Wall Street Journal has uncovered a Twitter test that could help make it much easier to decipher some of the more “advanced” and confusing looking hashtags.
In this test, when you search for a hashtag in iOS, you will not only see the Tweets that use that hashtag, but you will see a brief definition of the hashtag. That is a feature I hope that they stick with. This could save a lot of people a lot of time trying to figure out what a particular hashtag even means. That was always an issue for new users of the Twitter platform, and I think we can all understand why. This could be a major change in that particular dynamic and could help bring about a new era of ease of use for Twitter newbies.
In the end, we will see how this test works it’s way out. Something like this may not always work, even though it’s a great idea. There could be some nasty hashtags trending on certain day that could totally ruin somebody’s experience if this goes through. Keeping up with hashtags could end up being a pain to deal with on a daily basis as well.
What do you think of this new test Twitter is taking a stab at?