UPDATE: Learned from @indiekid and @w1redone over dinner that (a) others were using this convention two months earlier in California (doh!) and (b) there is a site dedicated to tracking hashtags: hashtags.org. Cool that Jason and I independently hit upon the same symbol to indicate locations.
The web has a new convention for usernames, could we use one for locations? And why do these things catch on?
In Egyptian Hieroglyphics, names were always circled–an early example of semantic tagging.
Twitter users created the ‘@username’ convention on their own almost as soon as the service started, and it has now spread beyond twitter. Usernames are prefixed with a @ symbol to indicate that you’re talking about a person, and the system can turn that name into a link.
In December Jason Lange and I hatched the idea of using hash marks to indicate locations. We settled on the # symbol because (a) @ is already taken (b) it sorta looks like grid lines and (c) it is used URL’s to indicate a location on a page. Of course, we twittered our new idea:
Brainstorming like crazy with @susqhanamj at #trilogy. - 09:15 PM December 07, 2007
At dinner last night, I heard the folks at Twitter HQ are talking about the this geo-hash convention.
But what is it good for? Imagine if each location had it’s own page. So in my tweet above, you could click through to a #trilogy page for the Trilogy Wine Bar in Boulder. You could see other people who have talked about it and get a sense for the sort of people who go there.
Who creates content for these pages? Twitter could allow businesses to create their own accounts (as Facebook now does), but that wouldn’t cover things like parks and geographic landmarks. So better yet: make locations into Wiki pages that anyone can edit.
No word from Egyptologists on what symbols they used for locations…
Stan,
You’re describing Brightkite 🙂 Want to meet up some time, and I’ll give you a demo?
Martin
Would love to see how it’s come along. Send me a mail and let’s set something up.
Stan,
Have you seen http://www.geograph.org.uk/ ? Gathering pictures for all of the UK, organized by map location.
Interestingly, the # prefix is also used for channels in IRC. which are kind of like locations.
Twitter has the L:place-where-you-are long time ago.
Yes, but that is more for your general geographic area (cities, zip codes, countries) and not for places or events. I wouldn’t set my L: location to “Trilogy bar, Boulder, Colrado” every time I went there.
The “L:” convention was also not a Twitter HQ idea: it was created by the twittervision people. Cool that Twitter is such a platform for ideas like this.
We had a huge discussion about it with my partner.
trying to find a way to expose microformat using special characters. One of the main problem is currently having different keyboards around the world and not having quickly acces to the same special letters.
I love the # I am using it for my stats # Users = Numbers of users. I will start to use it on twitter too to spread the word.
Good work.
We should come with more of those things. I am currently using @ on flickr a lot.
For the record – I have another inventor, along with some more smart ideas around the topic:
Sometimes ideas are just in the air, I guess!
Looks like I was *way* behind the curve. Here’s a post from factory Joe last August proposing #’s for channels:
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/08/25/groups-for-twitter-or-a-proposal-for-twitter-tag-channels/
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