14 DAY TRIAL // Hashtags have proven a very valuable tool on Twitter, either for good or bad, and are helping users keep track of current and unfolding events. But with the 140-character limit comes the need to keep hashtags as compact as possible, which leads, in some cases, to some pretty obfuscated names. Luckily there is a solution as “What the Hashtag?!” was set up as a wiki aiming to describe all of the more popular hashtags on Twitter.
Hashtags are a convention among Twitter users appending '#' to a word with functionality similar to the 'tags' used by blogs or other sites. The idea is to make it clearer what the tweet is about and to help others interested in the topic find it. But while it started out as a convention, the feature was finally integrated, with Twitter recently adding a link to the search page for the terms, similarly to the way it incorporated @replies in the past.
The system has its advantages but has some major drawbacks too, the first being the sometimes less than obvious meaning of the terms and secondly the fact that it is being abused by spammers or pranksters. “What the Hashtag” aims to solve the first one, and to a certain degree the second, by providing detailed information on the hashtag but also, interestingly, statistics, real-time monitoring of the term on Twitter and even a top of the biggest contributors to the stream.
The site was launched in February 2009 and now tracks 2,870 hashtags, not to mention that it can be edited by any user in true wiki fashion. Aside from the main site, WTH?! also offers a set of tools to make it even easier to make sense of the hashtags, with a Twitter bot, to which you can send a direct message with the term, a Greasemonkey Script, so hashtags on Twitter link directly to their WTH?! entry, and even a Firefox search bar entry.