The reason that twitter had to resort to hashtags, and the new /via and /cc notations, is because the twitter concept itself is so limiting
Posted by
Beryllium (aka grayman)
Dec 9 '09, 13:57
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140 characters. That's all. That's it.
If the service was about adding new features, those messages would be all Facebook-like, with automatic link previews, threaded comments, message bodies, inline images, all that stuff.
It's precisely because Twitter refuses to do that, that we see user-based innovation like hashtags.
Their most recent actual improvement to the way Twitter works is the new Retweet system. They saw something that was useful, but limited by the system ("RT @username" is a very long-winded notation, comparatively, and it's not very informative as to the true source of some tweets), and they extended it to allow A) full 140-char messages to be retweeted, and B) a list of information about the retweet popularity, so you can see the tweet's impact right away.
Now, keep in mind that Twitter has about eleventy billion more users than ST. Our post numbers simply aren't voluminous enough to establish same-day trends or require limiting the display to your friends.
Hashtags in ST subject lines are not really very innovative. I don't want to see boards and boards littered with them, and it's clear that many users feel the same way.
We have message bodies. Twitter doesn't have that. Which means that we don't need to copy the Twitter methodology, because the two services are fundamentally different.
That's not to say that we don't need *some* innovation, though. I mean, with the recent fix/full implementation of the NSFW feature, I think I've adequately demonstrated that per-post meta-information can be useful for us. We just need to handle it differently. :)
The way the Favourite/NSFW system works is by setting a flag in a special database table. The flag that is set ... is fundamentally identical to the concept of "tags" in any other information system - except that it's limited by the fact that I manually implement each one.
So if we need more meta-information, we simply need to think of what we want, within reason. I'm not going to put in 30 different tags for "gossip" or "michaeljackson" or "davidcarradinesboytoy" or "shitmydadsays"; only things which can be A) useful to individual users (i.e., Favourites, and the listing of Favourites on the Your Stats page), or B) useful to the group at large (i.e., NSFW link flagging).
And if I do add any to the current list, I'll carefully consider whether they can be leveraged in the same way as Favourites (and, for that matter, Link Clicks), to provide interesting information about posts.
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