What the heck does this # symbol mean everywhere? What does a hashtag do?

[A Weather Fan]

What the heck does this # symbol mean everywhere? What does a hashtag do? It is so frustrating?

[Chris]

I don't know I was gonna ask this.... Mabey it forwards the post to the person who made it?

[Antie Pantie]

LOL.

It's for twitter. Hastagging sort of 'groups' a series of tweets under one topic. So if something interesting is happening today, like power plant explosion, because people hastag their tweets, you can then search on twitter for that specific topic and find news, comments, jokes about it.

[Pragmatism Please]

It's like my favorite app, MySpace except people follow you around. It's sorta creepy.

[Zachery]

for twitter

[jthebass]

It groups post on twitter. You can click a hash-tagged topic and it will auto-sort and search all posts with that hash.

Its actually quite brilliant.

When the Iranian green revolution in Iran was happening, you knew in 10 minutes instead of 3 days later like regular media thanks to hash tags. When the meteor hit in Russia, within 30 minutes there were hundreds of posts with amateur video of the event that you could sort by clicking the tag.

Hashtags are the new media.