What's a hashtag when it's at home?

Got this awesome email from a friend:

"Maddie,

Has the term "twit" been coined for a person who cannot understand parts of twitter yet?? If not.... :)

Okay, please HELP ME! I am completely baffled by the # in twitter. Example "#followfriday". What the heck does # mean?? Is it a group? Is it majic??"

As it happens, there are a couple of good posts I just read that explain what a hashtag is and why you should use it.

Chris Carfi says, "Hashtags" are a simple way to make things you are writing (or photographing, or video-ing) more findable on the web."

He points to a good primer post by Amy Gahran, who says, "More and more people are covering live events and breaking news via Twitter — and usually there are several Twitter users covering the same event. Hashtags are a handy tool for pulling together such disparate coverage."

I remember when you first had to follow @hashtag on Twitter in order for your tagged keyword to be indexed. Then people started getting annoyed that other people were dropping hashtags all over the place like jimmies on ice cream... And it was definitely annoying. But the hashtag frenzy soon calmed down, and now of course they are pretty much required for any news item, event, or any other trending keyword that you might be using. Why? Here's my short and sweet definition:

A hashtag (the pound sign # placed in front of a keyword) enables all tweets about that keyword to be found in Twitter search and creates a hyperlink within a single tweet to that search.

Why is that "required"? So you can find all the stuff people are talking about around that subject, regardless of whether you follow those people talking about it or not. For any time-specific event, a hashtag for that event allows you to round up all the tweets around it - which leads to lots of other cool things like being able to find all the other Twitter users who were part of that event (or just interested in it) and, then you can follow them. Newbie twitterers who try it out during a conference can immediately find a bunch of people to connect to. Advanced Tweeps can expand their network. Organizations can find out all the people who were participating in their conferences.

You might ask, well how do people know what the hashtag is for a particular conference? What if people use several? I would say it's in the organizers' interest to publicize early and often what the hashtag will be. Just pick one, make it as short as possible (easier for people to use and won't cut too much into the 140 character limit), make it unique so there's less chance of it being used with something unrelated, and tell people about it.

Now you might argue that Twitter search can also search for any old keyword, whether hashtagged or not - that is true, but the clincher is that a hashtag within a tweet creates a link. No hashtag, no link. No link, no instant connection to all the other people talking about the same subject. Automagical!

So back to my friend - "twit" or not, hope that helps! :)