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!

So I’m not going to talk about the discussions or outcomes of the Future Summit, but rather focus on its use of Twitter as a broadcast and interaction medium and what I took from this. I’ll start by saying one very important thing: I wasn’t there. I was relying almost completely on the Twitter feed provided by a number of very dedicated and clued on Twitter personalities who did a great job.

The idea behind the Future Summit feed was (from what I’ve read) about trying to remove existing media hierarchies. This meant bypassing newspapers – too slow & bureaucratic; blogs – also too slow; television – not interactive. This left Twitter, the microblogging service taking the world by storm at the moment. What it also left us with was a 140 character limit.

As great a job as the Twitter correspondents were doing during the two day summit, though, I still don’t feel that I have a really well developed sense of what was said there. 140 characters, it must be said, doesn’t replace a full video feed. It also doesn’t replace blogs. It is, primarily, an interaction medium. There have been many events – really serious events – which have been covered by Twitter in very meaningful and constructive ways. I think in the vast majority of these cases, Twitter has been used as an interaction medium rather than a broadcast medium.

I think the tweet above demonstrates what I’m trying to say here – there’s a very broad brushstroke idea of what is being said, but it leaves more questions than it does answers. More often than not, the nuances of argument which were no doubt taking place at the Future Summit were lost in translation to 140 characters, and although it’s been noted that approximately half the questions asked of presenters at the summit came directly from Twitter, I suspect many of them digressed somewhat from the issue at hand due only to the fact that most people reading the Twitter stream would have had no idea what was actually being argued.

The best interaction I’ve seen with broadcasting, Twitter, and interaction is the interaction between tweeters during television shows (Stephen Conroy appearing on QandA a but over a month ago comes to mind). I think that with this in mind, the inclusion of a video stream of the Future Summit combined with the already established Twitter correspondents would be a great way to get people involved and interested in what’s happening. Rather than focusing on simply reporting the events of the summit, the Twitter contingent could then focus on being the mediators between the world of Twitter and the conference without needing to summarise very complex ideas into 140 characters for mass consumption.

That said, @futuresummit being reserved for some kind of coverage as was already present would also be good.

Overall, I get where the organizers of the Future Summit were coming from with this idea, and it is a good idea. I think the best (albiet old) idea here is that we don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater – lets not throw out old media completely in place of new media, because new media in many ways has grown out of traditional media forms such as television and video, and doesn’t quite work 100% without it.

Last Thursday, I went to a Twitter meet-up in Melbourne called @tweetupmellers. It was the first social-media-inspired meet-up I’ve been to, and I was pleasantly surprised. I won’t lie – there was a bit of the nervous anticipation that comes from meeting people that you know only through what on the face of things looks to be a limited protocol for interpersonal communication. So before I revisit the meet-up, I’m going to talk more about why those negative face impressions many people have of of Twitter are completely wrong!

I’m far from being the longest lived or most experienced user at Twitter – I’ve had an account since May 2008 and only really started using the site properly in mid-December. I guess that means I had an account before the real explosion, but only started using it when I could ride the shockwaves of Twitter’s success.

Since I started using the service in December I’ve built up roughly 1800 tweets, 250 followers and am following 170 people myself. In the ‘Twitterverse’ I would class myself as a fairly conservative number, but I’ve never been too aggressive about getting followers – I follow people whose tweets interest me and I tweet what interests me as well.

That, I think, goes to the root of what Twitter is about – and others have said this before me I know – but Twitter really is all about the people you follow and engaging with them in meaningful ways. This doesn’t by any stretch mean that you have to be interested in everything they say, agree with everything they say, or engage with them every time you’re on Twitter. It’s about tapping into the vast amount of interesting personalities, information and experiences of people all around the world, and trying to engage with them and work with what you get to yours and the community’s benefit. When this happens, which it almost always does, a vibrant network forms to which you can talk, read along with and end up knowing quite a lot about, both individually and collectively – and that’s all in 140 character bites.

So, to get back to where I started, the whole idea of a Twitter meetup is to take these relationships to the next level and meet up in the flesh. @tweetupmellers was a good opportunity to meet people that I’ve been talking to for a while on Twitter, and meet some new people who I’ve since followed on Twitter. My nervous anticipation was somewhat misplaced. The whole thing was a fantastic success, and it’s amazing how much of an icebreaker Twitter can be (there was a lot of “Hi! What’s your name on Twitter?” going around, especially with me being the resident palm frond and all). It was a great way to connect with the Twitter community and totally flies in the face of the idea that social networking is anti-social – the favourite catch-cry of a fairly significant portion of the popular media.

If you want to see with your own eyes what Twitter is capable of, visit the site, and visit http://tweetupmellers.wordpress.com/ and see for yourself.

I’m sure this is only the beginning, not just of @tweetupmellers, but of Twitter in general and my experience of it. There’s no conclusion to this post, and by now I’m probably only talking to the converted. If I’m not – http://twitter.com/signup. Go there, now. You won’t regret it.

Signing off for now,

@mr_billiam.

Comment if you have your own Twitter stories or want to comment on mine. Oh, and if you have any corrections, too, because I’m sure it’s riddled with typos and such!