How To Become a #Tag
For anyone who has been living in a cave the last 18 months or so, a hashtag is used to give context or meaning to a tweet. And a tweet is a 140 character long post on Twitter, but I’m sure you knew that already 
I’ll give you an example – people, or tweeple to keep the Twitter lingo going, often use hash tags when live tweeting from an event. That way it becomes easier to make a selection from the tweets that have been send during that event. So it can serve as a reminder after the event, or even give people at home a sense of ‘being there’.
Hashtags are an integral part of the Twitter ecosystem and can often end up on Twitter’s hot topic list. It’s a great tool, but also a very fragile tool – as proven by the Habitat intern. Whilst looking to impress his employers he decided to spam politically delicate hashtags about the Iran Election and such.
A hashtag can also be used in a humorous way, in a bit of banter between friends for example. And this is how Iain Tait, partner at Poke went from @iaintait to #iaintait
Mark Earls used the launch of Google Wave and the huge amount of people desparate for an invite to get Iain onto the Twitter trending topics list.
It seems like people are still a sucker for the old skool chain letter scams.
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Nice except that it didn’t actually happen like that.
I just joined in on the ribbing of Iain by his mates – @eskimon’s tweet actually combined this with an attempt to ridicule the mania in the blogosphere over Wave invites. I thought it amusing so RTd but it clearly became a pain in the a*** for Iain very quickly (Sorry again, mate).
Of course, other folk RTd it so it’s odd to see myself described here as some causal factor – I wish I was as successful at this stuff as you suggest.
TBH It’s very striking to see how willing folk like you and other commentators are to see “volition”, “intent” and “influence” in my actions when there was nothing of the sort (except “influence” retrospectively or “accidentally”, as Duncan Watts puts it).
Just think it’d be good to reflect the truth here. The real world is messier than we’d often like to believe it is.
Interesting thoughts and thanks for clarifying that!
I would argue there was intent – the ‘experiment to create trending topic?’ would indicate this. It may have been tongue in cheek and nothing was expected, but the fact you even mentioned it suggests you considered it to be a possible outcome. However unlikely it may have been….
As you have a far larger following than @eskimon it’s also not unreasonable to think that your retweet was more likely to get the snowball rolling than his initial tweet. Or more likely, it was simply a lot of desperate and information hungry people following all Google Wave mentions.
I’d agree with your point regarding influence – whilst unintentional, it was infuence which led to the outcome of this bit of banter becoming a trending topic. I seriously doubt a few friends with a dozen followers between them would have been able to cause the same stir as you guys did.
I think this case shows the power of the internet – a message can spread like wildfire even if it’s unintentional.