Since its inception in July 2006, Twitter sure has come a long way. The site now has over 200 million users (As of March 2011) and it is the first port of call for all the latest information on everything from news, politics, culture, celebrities etc. One of the more interesting by-products of the service is the power of the hashtag. Hashtags were actually a creation of twitter users as a way to categorize messages. Clicking on a hashtagged word in a message will show you all the other tweets in that category.
I personally believe that hashtags can be extremely powerful in this day and age, a really fast way of communicating between a large group of people. One of first times that the hashtag rose to prominence was during the bombings of Mumbai in 2008. Several people on the ground near the scene tweeted the unfolding horror and these tweets quickly became invaluable in gaining a real-time perspective on events. In the days afterwards the hashtag #mumbaihelp was at the top of the trending topics list as the public looked to send aid to the people of Mumbai. Continue reading
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