Guest post by Maia Bittner
Here at NationalBLS, I've been using our twitter account to start conversations, discuss interesting news stories, and post updates. The focus of my posts is typically real estate, but I occasionally diverge into other topics I find interesting. Because most of my followers are real estate agents, I wanted a way to distinguish between the different topics I post about. Enter hashtags, Twitter’s implementation of a folksonomy. A tag-based organization system, or "folksonomy" is useful when content is being created at a high rate, and there are few places for which this condition is more true than it is for Twitter.
In case you're not familiar, Wikipedia defines a folksonomy as
"a user generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve web content such as Web pages, photographs and Web links, using open ended labels called tags... The folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate over time."
As mentioned above, Twitter calls their tags "hashtags", since they are preceded by a hash symbol (#). According to wthashtag.com,
"Hashtags are a method for grouping related tweets. If you are going to a conference, there is probably a designated hashtag. When you add that hashtag to your tweets, it makes it easier for other attendees to see what you are saying about the event. Hashtags are also helpful in finding other users who have similar interests."
Sounds pretty good, and it is, for the most part. There are a couple little problems though. wthashtag notes that "if you are going to a conference, there is probably a designated hashtag". Unfortunately, most of the time, most of us are not going to conferences. No one has designated a tag for real estate, so real estate themed posts are tagged with all kinds of different things: #realestate, #real_estate, #RE, etc. This fragmentation significantly reduces the utility of tagging, because people searching for #real_estate will miss your #realestate tagged post. In short, there's no synonym control in a folksonomy, which I view as a major flaw.
I hoped that this was not a fatal flaw, and that the Twitter folksonomy could be redeemed somehow. Perhaps someone should take it upon themself to designate an official tag for real estate (and other) topics? Traditionally, the alternative to a folksonomy is a taxonomy, an "authoritative" classification system. There are many reasons why this top-down approach is not practical for Twitter, not the least of which is the sheer size and diversity of the Twitter user base. For more information on this, see Why Taxonomy Fails. I don’t know how every Twitter user could learn the “correct” tag for millions of topics, and systematic approaches often lose ambiguous meanings and contexts (eg, if you wanted to use #RE to designate “rainy everglades”, you probably wouldn’t appreciate it being “autocorrected” to #realestate).
Both systems are less than ideal on their own, but their strengths and weaknesses complement each other well. Perhaps a compromise could be reached by combining the two systems? Currently, anyone can create a hashtag by prefacing anything with a hash symbol. This is convenient because, unlike in a taxonomy, the user does not have to navigate through a hierarchy of categories to find the term they want. I imagine that one implementation of a combination system could be an auto-complete feature. As a user starts typing, suggestions of common tags that start with the same letters could pop up, and the user could select the correct tag. I believe this would go a long way towards preventing duplicates, while keeping the classification system easy to use and democratic.
What do you think?
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