Revisiting #*: A Meta #Hashtag For Reviews

Earlier this week, I responded to a call from Jeff Jarvis for a technique to do the following:

1. Denote in some unambiguous way that a Twitter tweet is a review, like a movie or book review,
2. Have those reviews collated somewhere, and
3. Have the collated reviews served back into a Twitter account.

Jarvis thought that using the @username approach made sense for step 1, but I suggested that using #hashtag would be better. I designated #*, or hashstar, for that purpose. The nice folks at www.hashtags.org have already implemented step 2. I tried to use www.twitterfeed.com to accomplish step 3, but ran into several problems: www.hashtags.org *does* produce an RSS feed for each #hashtag, but the RSS feeds apparently lack the sort of timestamps that www.twitterfeed.com requires. So my new hashstar twitter account sits empty, although the tagged tweets are accumluating at #* on www.hashtags.org.

(I am ignoring the inelegant @twitcrit title that Jarvis offered.)

The post led to a bunch of comments that are worth pulling out of the shadows:

[from the comments]

I had the best luck taking this PHP script for posting from RSS to Twitter: http://tinyurl.com/ypjuve

And then setting a cron job to run it every so often.

(I had to modify parse.php to use curl rather than fopen, since some hosting providers don’t allow that).

In other words you may need to roll your own here.

Posted by: John Eckman | January 06, 2008 at 07:30 AM

Ugh. No thanks.

Hmmm… We don’t block #hashtags as a tag. A quick look shows your tweet at http://hashtags.org/tag/hashtags/

I’ll see if I can’t get date/time put on the feeds for you today.

Thanks,

~Aaron

Posted by: Aaron Farnham | January 06, 2008 at 08:53 AM

Hasn’t been implemnted yet, but Aaron is scheming about doing something much larger at www.hashtags.org. More to follow on that.

Stowe, we’ve had a Twitter Reviews system running since June 07 (same idea also runs on Jaiku and Pownce). You write reviews in a particular format like so:

Review RatingFrom1-5 ItemName: Opinion

and we collect them on LouderVoice if you let us know about your Twitter account. Anyone can search on them in LouderVoice (where they are presented as hreviews) and we send them to the source Tweet.

Details on our blog

We’d be happy to add support for hashtags too.

Posted by: Conor O’Neill | January 06, 2008 at 08:56 AM

I will give that a spin.

I have been doing a little book reading session for the last couple of weeks and used hashtags for couple of days to classify the twits.

Like your idea of #* for all reviews. Extending this idea can give us a whole little one letter taxonomy!

#$ - Finance

#? - question. will make hoosgot.com irrelevant

etc..

As an alternative for Twitterfeed why not look at Yahoo Pipes? From what I have seen it gives enough control to be able to filter the standard twitter RSS feeds.

Thoughts?

Posted by: Mahesh CR | January 06, 2008 at 10:49 AM

I love it! Let’s publish a longer list, with #! for alerts, too.

One extra note: we actually ran with a similar setup to the one you are proposing from Jun-Nov. Basically anyone could friend @review, we’d friend back and then we’d collect all the reviews. But our user feedback was that they wanted their Twitter reviews associated to their specific LouderVoice account rather than being in a giant pool.

I’ll see if we can get basic hashtags support in this week. The only tiny drawback is that #’s are used for channels on Jaiku so we may go with a slight variation for that platform.

Posted by: Conor O’Neill | January 06, 2008 at 10:52 AM

Will stay tuned.

I’m kinda suprised you did not see LouderVoice running at Reboot 9 because a few of the Irish participants were texting LouderMinis from Copenhagen. The integration with Twitter and Jaiku work really simply and reviews I make from the main website land on my Six Apart blog. In my opinion, if someone is going to duplicate the LouderVoice effort, you should try to raise the bar to incorporate other social media such as video or tagged images.

Posted by: Bernard Goldbach | January 06, 2008 at 01:52 PM

I didn’t.

I have to admit I’ve ignored the hashtags thing, just because I never saw an explanation of what you were trying to accomplish (though I guessed pretty accurately).

I like this micro formatting idea, especially for reviews and other Tweets (perhaps #YVR - the three letter code for an airport - for updates that other travellers could use to warn them of congestion, etc.?)

I’ll be following this discussion, and trying out a few reviews with #*.

Posted by: Eric Eggertson | January 06, 2008 at 07:31 PM

Hopefully, the www.hashtags.org guys will straighten things out and it will work, at some point.

Trying the “why not both?” idea, I started a tweet with both @twitcrit and #*. If it hadn’t been for the Twitterfeed issues, everything would have worked perfectly. As it was, my tweet showed up at @twitcrit, hashtags.org, and Club 140, and it theoretically would have shown up at @hashstar if the technical issues could be resolved.

This illustrates an issue with multiple standards in general: namely, how can someone comply with multiple standards without breaking adherence to one of the standards? In this case, @twitcrit and #* are compatible with each other and can be used together, which is a good thing.

Posted by: Ontario Emperor | January 06, 2008 at 08:00 PM

LouderVoice support for hashtags in our mini-reviews on Twitter is now live. Example here. Pownce and Jaiku later today.

Posted by: Conor O’Neill | January 07, 2008 at 06:49 AM

Cool. Except I can’t get it to work. Do the tags have to be at the end of the tweet? Bummer if so.