What do you love about Twitter? Is it conversations? The stream of consciousness flying past at a million miles a minute? The ridiculously fast reporting of global events? The amazing resources of all your followers at your fingertips all the time?

There’s a lot to love about Twitter, and most of those good things are beyond the simple 140 characters, and all about community. Hashtags are one of those very community things about Twitter which grew out of nowhere to become one of the most useful things in the arsenal of a Twitter user in categorizing and sorting through the vast amounts of information on Twitter.

Combined with Twitter Search, hashtags create impromptu groups of people who aren’t necessarily following each other, and lets them keep track of events, happenings, topics and ideas without requiring Twitter to build a more complex and less flexible system of groups for tweets. The problem is, they’re beginning to show signs of becoming less useful than they have been, and very quickly indeed.

Perhaps the most successful hashtag phenomena in Twitter is #followfriday – the weekly ritual of nominating people you think other people reading your tweets should follow. The concept only began in January (without the hashtag) and since then it’s become one of the big viral hits of Twitter – all Friday, every Friday since late January, many tweeps have been tweeting their #followfriday recommendations. #followfriday is probably the most relevant canary to demonstrate the problem that hashtags have. There has been a marked decline in #followfriday recommendations, at least in my stream, for the past few Fridays. People are starting to get angry at the constant stream of username lists flying past, drowning out their own tweets, and for the same reason aren’t posting their own recommendations.

Another problem with hashtags, and probably more relevant than #followfriday, is the emerging hashtag memes. Hashtags themselves, for a time, became a meme, but they were mostly nonce creations (eg. #thereallylonghashtagsthatareentertaininginthemselves). What’s started happening, though, is that hashtags are starting to take over the Twitterstream all the time. A few examples from the last week are:  #3wordsbeforesex #3wordsduringsex #3wordsaftersex (noticing a pattern?) and as I write this, 6 of the 10 trends on Twitter are hashtag memes: #liesboystell #liesgirlstell #3wordsaftersex #twistory #thingsmummysaid #3breakupwords.

Now I’ve got nothing against memes, but I don’t think memes are what hashtags are all about. Maybe we need a new standard – %3breakupwords, then have a separate trending list on Twitter search, maybe? In any case, there is an increasing amount of noise in Twitter trends, and they go back to hashtags, and that’s a problem. It undermines, at a fundamental level, one of the important ways for Twitter to show what it’s thinking.

Of course, this is only part of the problem, and something else which has become a problem in recent days and weeks is the growing noise from bots trawling the trends list and spamming the stream with their products, ads and smutty rubbish. I don’t purport to have an easy solution to that though, other than tightening up the sign-up page of Twitter to stop these annoying bots signing up en mass.

Do you have an opinion on the future of hashtags? Tell me what you think in the comments!