if you know a lot about TWITTER please read :]?

[PATD<3]

okay so i’m new to twitter and i need help

what does it mean when people post new tweets with random words that have this “#” symbol in front of them? are those just tags or what?

[neal0on14]

Once you've started using Twitter, it won't take long before you come across what's known as a hash tag. That's when you see something in a tweet that has a # prefix. (The # is a hash symbol, hence the term hash tag or hashtag.)

For example, if you've seen tweets related to the recent U.S. government stimulus bill, you may have noticed some of them had #stimulus in them.

It took me a while to wrap my head around what the purpose of this thing was but, once I "got it," I realized it's not as complicated as it seems.

A hash tag is simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic. For example, if you search on #LOST (or #Lost or #lost, because it's not case-sensitive), you'll get a list of tweets related to the TV show. What you won't get are tweets that say "I lost my wallet yesterday" because "lost" isn't preceded by the hash tag.

The good thing about the hash tag is that if someone wrote a tweet without putting the word LOST in the main message, it will still show up in your search because of the tag. Eg. "Who is hotter? Jack, Sawyer, or Desmond? #lost"

The flip side is that if you search using the tag, and someone wrote a tweet about the show without including it, that tweet won't show up in your results, even if LOST appears in the text. Eg. "Do you think LOST has jumped the shark?"

In a way, hash tags allow you to create communities of people interested in the same topic by making it easier for them to find and share info related to it.