What The Hashtag – Tracking Hashtags Just Got Better

by Andy Brudtkuhl on May 14, 2009

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What The Hashtag is a service from the Microblink team that helps track and analyze hashtags on Twitter. Hashtags are denoted by the “#” symbol in front of a word and have become a way for people to track and follow Twitter discussions. The WTH service was born out of the need to have a centralized wiki for people to find out more information about the hashtag.

While improving the layout and design of the site, the team added some great new features. First, they’ve added additional statistics.

We’ve been tracking the number of times a hashtag is being used for awhile, as well tracking the top contributors, but now we also call out the number of uses made by each contributor, and the total number of tweets and unique contributors for a week’s worth of usage.

You can also run transcripts of hashtag usage – which allows you to export all of the tweets from a specific hashtag for any date range. This eliminates the tedious task of scrolling through Twitter search to catch up on missed tweets.

One of my favorite new features they have added is the ability to watch and participate in a hashtag conversation directly on their site. Now you can join the conversation while watching it in real time…

Click the participate link and a box will pop open allowing you to craft your message. You will be greeted by a message box with the familiar character counter and your hashtag already inserted. Just include your username and password and we submit everything to Twitter directly through their API.

Here we see how they are tracking the #fixreplies hashtag.

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Tagged as: hashtag, microblink, twitter, wthashtag

{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }

Tsudohnimh May 14, 2009 at 11:56 am

Thanks for the post. This will make hashtag research and info infinitely better. Thanks for the info.

Tsudohnimh
@tsudo on Twitter
KnowtheNetwork.com

Tsudohnimh’s last blog post..Why Twitter will Outlast Facebook.

Andy Brudtkuhl May 15, 2009 at 9:24 am: Yes I am constantly wondering what people are taking about when they are using random acronym hashtags.. that’s where this service adds value. With statistics and real time tracking it’s all the better

Reply

Rob Jensen May 14, 2009 at 10:23 pm

We (microblink) think we really have something here and it is great to see others are finding it useful. We have several other ideas in the works however this was our first major redesign and feature launch. It is great to see that it has been so well received.

Thank you for the blog post and I’m looking forward to MTE tomorrow.