Twitter - what does it mean when you put # before something?

[Lissa]

I just recently got Twitter and just recently found out that putting @ before someone's name is replying to them or talking to them or whatever. But now Ive been seeing # before people's names. What does that mean? and are there any other things like that I should know about?

[Zanneth]

This symbol is referred to as a "hashtag" and it notifies twitter index services that it is a tag. It allows for people to dynamically search for twitter entries and pull up entries specific to a certain topic.

For example, if I was a company talking about a new product and wanted feedback about it, I would notify people to tweet about it by putting #product. That way I could easily refer back to those posts and gather a substantial amount of feedback.

[BIG SEXY]

Putting a # in front of a word is called a hashtag. It's used for searching tweets. So if you make a comment about American Idol during the show you could tweet and then put #americanidol at the end of your tweet and anyone looking at that hashtag will see your tweet.

[madura]

Tagging helps to organize and share our online information with others. By attaching one or more keywords to a Flickr photograph, for example, we group it together with others that have the same tag. Hashtags # serve a similar purpose on Twitter. The aim is to bring some order to Twitter users' published updates ("tweets") and make it easier to follow a topic of interest. For example, there’s a group for #googlenews, #love and even #kmart