What the #htag? No I'm Not Using Dirty Words!

But I almost want to... You have got to be kidding me! I received an e-mail alert that someone mentioned me on Twitter today. Hmm, I wonder who, was it in response to something I posted earlier? Noooo, it said:

"Happy #FF to great local tweeps @KarensMyRealtor" Now I obviously have no clue to what #FF means, so like the good school girl that I've always been, I go and look it up. Sorry I GOOGLE'D it. LOL. Okay, I found a definition that says it means "follow Friday" WTH? Well that cleared things up for me... NOT! Okay, now I have to figure out what that means and why does it pertain to me? Let's look that up, and yes, I'm feeling like a caveman right now.

The definition of #FollowFriday is every friday you can use #followfriday to suggest people to follow, e.g. you would write #followfriday @sarahlane @KarenButler @JoeDonut.

And in case you didn't know this (#) is called a HashTag. You'll see something in a tweet that has # as a prefix. For example, if you've seen tweets related to the recent college football scandal you will notice some have a #Sandusky in them. So basically a hash tag is simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic. Example, if you type in #Lost (it's not case sensitive by the way), a list of tweets related to the TV show. What you won't get are tweets that say "I lost my keys, my wallet or my dog", because they aren't precedd by the hash tag.

The flip side is that if you search using the #, and someone wrote a tweet about the show Lost without including it, that tweet won't show up in your result, even if Lost appears in the tweet eg, "Do you think Lost has more fans than project runway?"

So in essence, it gives you a way of doing some targeted searches like #Floridaopenhouse. Technology is only as good as what you can understand.

Now, don't we all feel smarter? I know I do!