Chris Messina on Twitter 'Tracking' and #Hashtags

A comment from Chris that should not be buried in the comments:

[from /Message: Twitter Supports 'Tracking' But Not #Hashtags?]

Hey Stowe, thanks for your continued support on this. I completely agree with your assessment about the "declarative" or intentional nature of hashtags. This is something that I argued debated with Jack about, but ultimately lost out.

I do like the elegance and implementation of the "track" feature, but I don't like how it still misses things that go unsaid but are otherwise related to what I want to track (again, pointing to the purpose of hashtags -- a means of meta-describing your content).

My biggest disappointment with the track feature is how anti-social it is. Whereas @replies allowed you to eavesdrop on conversations, track words are, so far, explicitly private, meaning that people can spy on words (or users) while no one benefits from that knowledge.

I thought I was pretty clever in tracking the terms 'earthquake' and 'quake' but no one else will know because the feature as implemented never gives me the chance to share them with the world.

Ho hum.

Yes, the social dimension -- begin able to share tags, to participate in the community implied by a tag -- is absolutely lost with Twitter 'tracks' as implemented. I guess the Twitter viewpoint is more like a communication tool, pushing info to your cell phone, and not a community model. But isn't that the opposite of how Twitter feels?

Weird.