As Twitter matures as a service it’s becoming far more useful as a tool. The use of #hashtags to allow flexible search and monitoring of topics means you can find relevant information in the massive amount of updates. TweetDeck’s search facility lets monitor topics in real time, and there are other web or desktop tools that let do the same thing.
#hashtag, Current Affairs And Twitter Events
The #hashtag isn’t just for topic searches. It’s also used to create events, allowing everyone to follow along. A topical one today is #teaparty, the Twitter contribution to the protests taking place on US tax day. It’s also used for live updates of events and conferences, demonstrated by the #sxsw tag for updates on the recent South by Southwest event.
Live coverage of events and news is great, but I’m also impressed by the way that the #hashtag has been used to start Twitter specific events. One of the most popular is #followfriday. Every week it encourages people to recommend others to follow on Twitter. They tag their post with #followfriday so that even if you’re not a follower of someone you can still see the their recommendations. I find #followfriday hit and miss and never have any idea how to pick and choose which recommendations to look into, but it’s a hugely popular event.
#themethursday For Great Focused Content
I’d like to take time to highlight a newer #hashtag event, #themethursday. Popular and active, it’s genuinely useful as well. It’s set up by Grace Smith, and the idea is simple. During the week people suggest themes. The last theme was ‘Blogging’, others include ‘jQuery’ and ‘Wordpress’. Grace announces the theme, and that Thursday the aim is to tweet with the tag #themethursday useful links and articles on the topic.
An example post:
88 Unmissable Wordpress Links. http://bit.ly/Doevi #themethursday
There’s always good resources and articles being posted and retweeted on Twitter on a day to day basis. #themethursday has two major advantages:
- The information is very focused and on topic
- The resources aren’t what’s just been posted on blogs today or this week
You get a comprehensive overview of the best resources past and present on a particular topic. If the topic is one that’s useful for your work, that can be invaluable. Even better, Grace creates a round-up of the best links of the day on her blog, so that there’s a permanent collated record.
Tomorrow is #themethursday, so I advise you to keep an eye on the feed and find out what the topic is. Follow @themethursday and contribute and encourage what’s a great Twitter resource.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=203a0c8d-c40b-48e9-be58-8d63c044b07e)
2 Comments
Thanks Robin for the superb write up for themethursday. It grew out of a freelance theme i was on one day and thought why not do a useful theme like this every week and get as many people involved tweeting great links as possible then collecting all those links for future reference.
It continues to develop and grow because people find it genuinely useful and helpful plus it’s fun for me to :-)
Hi Grace. My pleasure to highlight #themethursday. I always enjoy checking up on the resources it provides, and it also seems to help develop twitter networks outside the context of #themethursday itself.
2 Trackbacks
[...] the weaknesses of #followfriday. I touched on the same weaknesses recently when I talked about the use of #hashtags on Twitter. #followfriday has a great ethos, but it’s turned into a day where people just post huge lists of [...]
[...] I’m not a big fan of #followfriday, because it’s just lists of “people to follow” without context. My preferred tool for finding new people to follow is Twubble. It’s a simple tool; it will search through people you’re following and give you a list of suggested links based on who they’re following. I check out the site at least once a week. [...]