This is just a quick announcement to let everyone know that we’ve decided to put WTHashtag up for sale. We’re getting pretty steady traffic (just under 2000 hits per day) and earn $40-$50 per month from our featured users banner. So, we’ve got traffic and we’ve been monetizing for a while and it’s a self-sustaining site for the most part. We simply don’t have the time or passion to grow the site to its full potential. If anyone is interested in taking over the reigns, email us at services at microblink dot com and we can get the ball rolling.

What You Get

• WTHashtag.com
• blog.wthashtag.com
• api.wthashtag.com
• Thousands of users and thousands of pages already created for you

There are two more features we’re proud to announce today: an API and a streaming widget.

WTHashtag API

By using our API you’ll be able to embed usage charts, compare the usage for multiple hashtags, or get hashtag definitions. All the functions we support, as well as parameters and use examples, are listed at api.wthashtag.com. We plan on building this out in the future, so stay tuned developers. If you have any suggestions for methods you would use, leave a comment or use our feedback forum. We do plan on adding write access to provide short definitions, just not until we figure out exactly how to handle authentication properly.

Streaming Widget

By adding a few lines of HTML to your page’s code you can embed a real-time streaming widget. Here’s how it works:

<script>
var wth = {
  hashtag: 'iranelection',
  width: 600,
  refreshRate: 5000, // in milliseconds
  smallHeight: 450,
  largeHeight: 900,
  linkto: "wth" // also could be "twittersearch"
};
</script>
<script> type="text/javascript" src="http://api.wthashtag.com/js/stream.js" /></script>

The only required attribute for the wth{} object is the hashtag – the rest are just preferences. What you see above results in the following widget:

If you click the hashtag you can actually switch the hashtag. The widget will automatically updated itself on the next refresh. Feel free to add your own CSS to style elements in the widget, but please leave the “powered by” logo at the bottom.

The WTHashtag team has been discussing entry barriers on the site for a while and we thought that we should offer more ways for people to authenticate with our service. We’ve taken the first step and added OpenID as a way of authenticating to WTHashtag.

Before you proceed, we want to warn you that this plugin is a little buggy and does some irrational things sometimes. It provides virtually no warning or confirmation messages. We’re really sorry about that, but it’s the best available and the plugin does work if you complete the process.

Connect your WTH account with an OpenID account

The first thing you’ll need to do is log out of WTH and then click the “Log In with OpenID” link in the upper right of the screen. You’ll be presented with a ton of services you can use to log in with. Choose your service, supply your ID, and click Log In. You’ll be sent over to your provider where you’ll authenticate yourself to them. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be returned to What the Hashtag.

When you get back to our site you’ll need to complete the “Finish OpenID login” form.

• If you’ve already got an account, check the first radio button and enter your username and password, then click Log in. (You might see a verification error, just ignore it)
• If you don’t have an account, select one of the two other radio buttons and click Log in. An account should be created for you.

Finishing Up

Once your WTH account and OpenID account are connected, you’ll see an icon next to your username.

The next time you come back to the site, opt for the OpenID login instead of the standard login. You should be good to go! If you encounter any problems, please contact us and we’ll try to help you through it.

We’ve been cranking away at new features and style updates pretty much since the day we released WTHv3. Let’s get right into what you’ll see in the next release of What the Hashtag.

Note: The screenshots you see below probably won’t completely reflect the final design.

OAuth Integration

One of the biggest features we wanted to implement was OAuth so you could tweet directly from WTHashtag quickly, easily and – most importantly – securely. Following the footsteps of other popular Twitter interfaces, we’ve allowed you to connect up to three Twitter accounts to your WTH account. There’s also a method for shortening URLs using bit.ly, is.gd, or idek.net.

Transcript Exports

People are raving about our ability to export transcripts for a hashtag over a given timeframe. An easy to read, printable document outlining all the uses of a hashtag is a fantastic resource, especially for chat tags.

We’ve added another output option to the mix, and that’s a PDF. It looks and feels the same way (for the most part) as it’s brother the HTML version but is packaged up so you can save a single file to your computer.

Article Page Facelift

We’ve slightly redesigned the page for hashtags to make it a bit more contemporary (”Web 2.0-ey”). For starters, we’re giving away even more statistics for a hashtag. If you click the more stats link under the Top Contributors section you’ll find useful info such as tweets per day, % of tweets that come from the top 10, % of tweets that are retweets/mentions, and % of tweets that have multiple hashtags. This is on top of the infamous Top 10 that seems to embarass most people who see their name on the list.

Categories

In the very first implementation of WTH we built out a section called See Also, which was later renamed to Related Hashtags. This section is meant to contain links to other hashtags that are directly related to each other (e.g., #iranelection and #cnnfail). Unless you know what you’re looking for, you won’t know where to start browsing.

This is where our new categorization system becomes useful. You have the option of adding hashtags to one or more categories; you can also browse categories and see what pages fit there. For example, check out our MLB category with links to all 30 teams’ hashtags or our Chats category with a pretty good list of Twitter-based community chats.

We feel it’s important to note that the Related Hashtags section is for directly related tags, while the categories section is for more loosely related groupings. A great example is BarCamps – they’re not directly related but they should probably be in the same category. This makes it much easier for everyone to discover content.

Most Active Hashtags

If you want to know what tags are most used, just visit our homepage where you’ll find that box in the right column. If you want more than just the last hour, click one of the timeframe links to see which hashtags are the most popular over the last 12, 24, 72, and 168 hours.

TweetShrink

Since we’ve added the 140 character description box there have been plenty of times when it didn’t feel like enough. A budding new-ish service called TweetShrink steps in here and helps us help you fit that description into 140 characters. Once you break the 140 character limit, but button will be enabled and you can ask it for assistance. Don’t get too greedy – TweetShrink has a habit of cutting your text in half when it doesn’t know what else to do.

The Full Monty

OK, maybe not the full monty, but here’s a snapshot of the new and improved homepage.

Take notice of the new icons underneath the hashtags in the left column. The group of people signifies a community-created entry which means one of the registered users created that page. As our way of saying thanks, we denote these hashtags and give you some credit in the hover text for the image. The miniature graph image you see means the hashtag started out as a trend and our bot picked up on it.

The hashtags that are currently trending are listed at the top for easy access. To edit a description, click the shaded green box and a text box will shift up and you can enter your definition. The redesign makes more use of AJAX than previous versions did.

So, did we miss anything? If you know of something we could implement that isn’t depicted above, leave a comment and tell us what it is.

Friday, June 12 marked the final game of the series in two teams’ quest for the 2009 NHL Stanley Cup. The Pittsburgh Penguins (#pens) and the Detroit Red Wings (#redwings) battled line to line for 60 minutes, but their fans were also battling: on Twitter.

Early on NHL fans using Twitter began tweeting about their favorite teams using fairly standardized hashtags. Being veterans of the service, they understood how using hashtags could connect them to other fans. By following your team’s hashtag, you could easily seek out others using the same (or hashtags for sworn enemies) and follow/unfollow accordingly.

NHL hockey and hashtags

Although several NHL teams have joined Twitter and started tweeting highlights of the games, following your team’s hashtag still gives you an entirely different perspective. Just like watching the hashtag for an event, listening in on team hashtags is almost like being right there in the stands, minus the expensive food and drinks. You get to hear what other people are thinking or saying about the game, rather than what the loudspeaker is spouting or the announcer is rattling off.

What is interesting about hockey fans using Twitter during the Stanley Cup finals is that the number of hashtagged tweets supporting the Penguins seemed to grow with the team’s momentum. The Red Wings came sailing into game six straight off a 5-0 win over the Penguins, also leading hashtag chatter (as compared to the Penguins) for the entirety of game six. However, after the Penguins clenched a 2-1 win over the Red Wings in game six and forced a champion-determining game seven, the #pens tweets started to swell.

During the seventh game of the Stanley Cup finals series, Penguins fans out-tweeted Wings fans by 22%, helping to offset the 20,000 screaming fans inside Joe Louis arena, a majority of them rooting for the home team Red Wings.

How the Stanley Cup Finals played out

They say that teams draw off of the energy of the crowd, and it looks as if the Pittsburgh Penguins were able to do just that. The Penguins pulled off a strong 2-0 lead by the end of the second period, with the Red Wings only mustering the strength to match with one goal of their own in the third. The last few seconds of the game were a flurry of shots and a flying Fleury, but ultimately the Penguins emerged on top.

We can’t draw any official correlations between hashtags and hockey performance, but here’s to the #pens fans for helping tweet their team to victory.

The team at Microblink has been an active user of Yammer since they won the TechCrunch 50 last summer. We hold group discussions, share interesting links and post idle thoughts or ideas we have during the day.

What the Hashtag is our first real project as a result of Microblink and things have been moving along fairly steadily. Right now we are in the midst of another design update to the interface and also looking at adding more organization to the site.

In talking about how to organize the hashtags on our site, we ended up getting into a battle over whether or not hashtags could be organized at all, given their unorganized and haphazard manner.

Check out the unedited, unfiltered stream between Rob and I on Yammer below. Read More »

Have you been feeling a bit woozy lately? Are you noticing droplets of blood staining your shirt collar? Do you find yourself shying away from anything with garlic in it? If you meet any of these criteria, chances are you’ve received a #vampirebite from a Twitter Vampire.

Start Biting!

Twitter Vampire is a Twitter-based game where friends can bite each other virtually and earn points for doing so. The more people you bite, the more points you get. The Twitter Vampire website hosts a leaderboard showing who has bitten the most people and who has been bitten the most.

When a user goes through the Twitter Vampire website and bites someone else, an update is sent from the biter’s Twitter account to let friends know that they’ve been bitten.

What’s the Point?

So what is the point of all of these vampire bites? There isn’t one. You can equate #vampirebite tweets with throwing sheep on Facebook (or the most-likely-similar vampire biting application that also plagued Facebook users).

The hashtag factor in this application is that every single tweet sent out related to the game gets tagged with #vampirebite. Outside of people asking what the hashtag is for, I don’t see a lot of conversation taking place around it. The site was designed by Gray Tartlet for what we can only assume was an experiment in design and utilizing Twitter as an interactive platform.

Watch #vampirebite on What the Hashtag

You can follow @VmpTw on Twitter to stay up with all the bites or watch the #vampirebite hashtag page to see how many fall victim to this ghoulish game.

For the sake of Twitter’s Trending Topics, I hope this game doesn’t catch on. I’m not against games using hashtags on Twitter, but the way in which they are using them here just isn’t adding any sort of value.

A feature that we’ve had around for quite a while is the ability to submit a short description from Twitter. We’d like to call more attention to this feature as we’ve found a better way to display our contributions from Twitter. First things first: how to submit a description:

At the end of each trend notice we send out you’ll find the words “define it” followed by a link. The link takes you to Twitter with some text prefilled – all you need to do is provide a definition.

Just add your definition for the term after the hashtag and hit submit. Our bots will take it from there.

Previously, we added your description into the body of the page’s content under the Description header. As a way of saying thanks for making a contribution, we’ve decided to make it a bit more prominent.

If there are multiple submissions for the same hashtag, you’ll find scroll buttons to the right of the definition bubble.

So there you have it – yet another way you can interact with our service. If you have any suggestions for features, hit up our contact form or leave us a comment.

Earlier this evening we pushed out the third iteration of our site’s interface. We’ve been up and running on a makeshift install of MediaWiki for some time now, but this latest version aims to take us to the next level.

A More Actionable Front Page

Starting with the newly designed front page, the actions a user can take are clearly outlined. We’ve got a newly improved search bar, the latest trending hashtags and a list of recently added hashtags.

Related to the recently added hashtags, users now have the ability to contribute short descriptions on the front page with a single click of the mouse (and no account required).

Improved Layouts on Hashtag Pages

The pages for individual hashtags have also gone through a major redesign. We scaled back a bit on the number of fields we create by default, but also worked to rearrange the content on the page into a format that is easier to decipher.

Statistics, Statistics, Statistics

We’ve been tracking the number of times a hashtag is being used for awhile, as well tracking the top contributors, but now we also call out the number of uses made by each contributor, and the total number of tweets and unique contributors for a week’s worth of usage.

Run Transcripts for Hashtag Usage

This new feature is sure to be popular with those who participate in hashtag chats. With the new transcript option, you can get a printout of all tweets with a specific hashtag for any date range.

In the past users would often resort to combing through Twitter Search and copying/pasting results or saving TweetChat pages as HTML files if they wanted to see what had been discussed during a Twitter chat. Now users just navigate to the hashtag they are interested in, click the transcript button and type in the dates they are looking for. We will generate a single page file with all of the tweets, in order, and supply it in an easy to save or print format.

Watch and Participate from a Hashtag Page

The Monitter widget has been very helpful for us in displaying the latest tweets about a hashtag, but now we’ve expanded that Twitter stream by allowing users to submit their own tweets directly from the page.

Click the participate link and a box will pop open allowing you to craft your message. You will be greeted by a message box with the familiar character counter and your hashtag already inserted. Just include your username and password and we submit everything to Twitter directly through their API.

Please Submit your Feedback

Now that the new design and new features have been launched, we want to hear from you. This started as a project that the three of us thought would be interesting, but each day we are discovering more users who are also finding it to be of value.

So, what can we do to improve the hashtag experience? What would make the site easier to use? Please submit your suggestions/requests in the comments here, or feel free to @reply us on Twitter (@wthashtag).

When you’re using hashtags to promote an event, like the recent #g20rally in London, it pays to get that information in front of as many people as possible.

In addition to our regular hashtag encyclopedia, we’ve also developed a “Featured Hashtag” section on the front of the site, specifically reserved for those looking to drive extra traffic and participation with their hashtag.

The Featured Hashtag Receives Numerous Benefits

If you reserve the Featured Hashtag spot, you receive a number of benefits:

• prominently featured on front page
• avatar-sized image to draw visual attention
• 140 character description of hashtag
• link to your hashtag page
• link to Twitter Search querying your hashtag

In addition, the WTH?! team will also work with you to ensure that your hashtag page is properly completed and full of information for interested users.

Pricing and Placement

See the Featured Hashtag pricing page for the most current details on cost.

We reserve the right to adjust prices at any time based on the amount of site traffic, though contracts already paid for will retain their agreed upon price. One featured hashtag placement is available at a time and subsequent availability will be based on a first come, first served basis.

A Hashtag Destination for Twitter Users

As the popularity of WTH?! continues to grow and we further solidify our standing as THE place to go for discovering more about hashtags, becoming a featured hashtag on the front page of our website will garner you the attention you want and deserve.*

With nearly 8,000 visits and 23,000 pageviews for the month of March (just one month outside of launch), you can see that WTH?! is already becoming a destination for hashtag resources.

* What the Hashtag makes no guarantees as to the effectiveness of a Featured Hashtag placement, but it is reasonable to believe that new placements may achieve similar results to previously featured hashtags.