By now, everyone should know about Hashtags on Twitter. You create a hashtag by using a pound (#) sign along with the keyword of choice (i.e. #iphone) and that message will become a part of the iphone hashtag page. Here’s the main screen that’s displayed:
The exciting part that many people don’t know about is the aggregated media area of the hashtag page that took me by surprise the first time that I saw it. At the right side of the main screen you will see the following:
The Aggregated Media area pulls all kinds things like photo’s, links, videos and blog posts from the web based upon the hashtag and stores them all in their respective categories. This was done with jQuery & Yahoo Pipes.
While this is an excellent idea and very useful and informative for anyone interested in the subject matter, I look forward to the next step which would be to actually cull all of these bits of data from the actual messages that were sent with the hashtag. For example, all of the images, videos, links and blog posts included in messages sent from the latest #SXSW would all be aggregated together the same way it’s done here.
In the mean time, this aggregated media feature is a nice addition to the hashtag experience. It’s a great example of what web 3.0 and the semantic web will be about. Think massive mash-ups of multimedia and other resources. This becomes especially useful and exciting for large groups of people that want to share information. After all, that’s one of the main reasons why hashtags were created.
By the way, here’s a cool FireFox extension that links hashtags from the Twitter webpage to the hashtag page.