Twitter Hashtag Communities
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Sat, Jul 24, 2010
Twitter may support the oddest forms of online communities ever created.
First, some context. Historically, online communities looked the same to everyone who visited or joined, whether it was a BBS, a Compuserve SIG, a LISTSERV with a web interface or a bulletin board. You could log in for the first time and see all the discussions, no differently than someone who had logged in a hundred times before.
Social networks came along and changed that, giving every member a unique view based on all the other members they had decided to follow. What I see is shaped by my circle of friends and contacts, and may have little if anything in common with what you see.
If Facebook is about connecting to your family and old friends, and LinkedIn is for connecting to colleagues and former co-workers, Twitter was the social network where you could be social with people you didn’t know: competitors and celebrities and others with shared interests.
When I first joined Twitter, I read every tweet from every person I followed. This wasn’t hard to do in the early days, because I only followed a few dozen people, few of whom tweeted much. Once I started following over 100 people, I had to shift to what Dave Winer calls the River of News, “watching the news flow by” – a few times a day I would read the river of tweets on my home page to see what people were talking about, often clicking through to read past tweets from people I knew or was interested in. If something was important, I hoped someone had recently retweeted it.
Then Twitter added lists, which allowed you to read all the tweets from a subset of people you follow. Lists could be shared and subscribed to, providing a common community whose composition was controlled by one member. I built a private list of people I knew offline and made that my default reading material, until the content of that list grew too large as well. Lists aren’t great communities – you see everything someone is writing about, which can range quite far from your particular interests.
Through all my use of Twitter, I have followed the most-widely used research hashtag to see what people were saying about market research: it has been a great way to connect with people I hadn’t met yet, who shared my passion for continual learning about research. Hashtags are single words (no spaces allowed) that start with a number sign and are used to categorize content. For instance, in the following tweet, the blue #MR indicates this message is about market research:
If you click on the #MR tag, you get a list of recent tweets using the tag:
Some of the other hashtags highlighted here are #FF (for Follow Friday, recommending other Twitter users you should follow), #marketing and #branding.
In the screenshot above, you can see a number of conversations taking place, as well as people sharing links and an instance of drive-by tweeting.
And drive-by tweeting is one of the things that makes Twitter hashtag communities so odd. People contribute to the community without ever participating. Many people will tag a post so that it can be easily found by others but do not themselves participate in the community that has formed around that hashtag. They never look at what others are saying using the hashtag. They’re party crashers, wandering across the dance floor shouting “Listen to me!” without any idea why people are dancing or what music they’re dancing to.
Another odd thing about Twitter hashtags is that some can form carnival communities, throwing up some rides, games and concessions on an empty parking lot and then moving on in a few days. Many conferences promote a hashtag for just such use: these communities can attract a lot of interest and traffic in their short life. For one example, check out my edited summary of #MRA_AC tweets for the 2010 Marketing Research Association annual conference last month.
Even the permanent communities have a temporary quality to them: want to see what members were talking about a month ago? You can’t. I paged through 41 pages of the #MR community and made it back five days, at which point any presence of the community vanishes. You to have to use third-party archival tools like TwapperKeeper if you want to save a record of the discussion for the future.
Because hashtag usage is so ad hoc, Twitter online communities can’t be moderated and can’t be managed. You can block a user so that they can’t contact you, but their posts will still show up in your view of the community.
And that’s about the only thing that’s not odd about Twitter hashtag communities: they look the same to everyone, regardless of whom you follow.