Twitter Supports 'Tracking' But Not #Hashtags?

It looks like Twitter has been quitely upgraded, and includes a new feature:

[from Tracking Twitter]

[...]

Today we're releasing a tiny feature to do just that, and we're calling it "tracking." If you've set up your phone or IM on Twitter, you can send a command like:

track NYC

When someone (anyone who updates in public) mentions "NYC," you'll get it on your device in real-time. From there you can send "whois username" to find out more about that person, or "follow username" to follow his or her updates. Don't want to receive anymore about NYC? Toggle it off with:

untrack NYC

You can create as many of these as you want, so send "track drinking tea", "track iphone", "track walking san francisco" and you'll receive matches for all. Want to get a list of what you're currently tracking? Send "track" alone (or "stats"). Turn them all off by sending "track off".

We love this technology, and hope you do too. We're continuing to refine and play with it, so please send your feedback!

What will you track?

So this lines up with Chris Messina's #hashtags, in a way, since I could track interesting #hastags. But, a few questions:

1. Why not on the basic interface? Why only on IM or SMS?
2. I don't necessarily want to be alerted, I want a place to go look, or an account that I can subscribe to.

#Hashtags are declarative and imply a community. If I tag things with '#travels' I would expect there to be a place where I can see the aggregated stream of all people's posts with '#travels' in it. But I don't necessarily want to see every post with the word 'travels' in it, do I?

I think they need to rethink this a bit.

Comments

[Steven Hodson]

While Twitter might not have implemented support for the #hashtag idea as put forth by Chris and discussed by yourself I would like to mention that the newest release of TwitBox (Windows)does support it.

Albeit it is only in it's early stages of support it is a start. Hopefully though Twitter will eventually make the "tracking" feature available via API calls.

[Stephanie Booth]

I like the fact it's possible to track any word, like my username, for example. It should still be possible to track hashtags with this system -- try "track #travel"?

One could then imagine that hashtags get a special treatment amongst all the possible strings that can be tracked: as you suggest, a page/feed where all updates with the same hashtag would be collected.

[Chris Messina]

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.