We are going to be moving hashtags.org over to EC2 Joyent for scaling to be handled when/if we blow up and start getting traffic. We’ve seen some pretty steep growth patterns and we’re afraid that if someone like Scoble picks us up we’ll be doomed. I won’t comment on the hardware we’re using right now, but let’s just say it needs to be a thing of the past.

As well, we’re going to be adding a few features here and there through the next few days, weeks, and months… so if you have any suggestions leave us some comments. We’ll do our best to translate.

(P.S. Hashtags has officially gone into debt ($0.10/hr). Aaron upped our EC2 server and the clock is ticking!)

* UPDATE*

We’ll be moving over to Joyent. After carefully looking at the offerings a bit more we found that Joyent was a better fit for this particular app.

Downtown Cartel is pleased to announce the launch of hashtags.org. The brainchild of Cody Marx Bailey and excellent code crafting by Aaron Farnham over a four week period resulted in a system for tracking #hashtags on the twitter network. It has the potential to track real-time events on the web. We think it will be interesting to watch over the next few months as we find new and interesting ways to utilize the service.

Upfront and quickly… you’re going to have to add the hashtags twitter user in order to have hashtags work. The track feature we were relying on isn’t going to scale well. Once you have added the twitter user, it will follow you automatically. That will allow us to track what you are saying on twitter and index your tweets. We feel pretty confident that the bot is stable enough to go ahead and get this show on the road.

That said, I guess we’ve finally come to the point that we can say… hashtags.org has officially launched.

Now that we managed to pass off the blame to Twitter for some of our issues we should take some blame ourselves. We were down for the last 24 hours or so because we forgot to put a file on the server that was needed to generate the sparklines. That really should not take 24 hours to fix. Our apologies to everyone who is checking us out.

That said we should let you in on what we are thinking. We are developing hashtags.org on the production site which means you get to see all the gory details and often broken features as they evolve. We will do our best to make sure things progress positively with each update. However, until our “grand opening” expect everything to be in a very alpha state. Right now the hashtags bot is relatively stable so if you do use hashtags in your twitters they should be caught (assuming twitter sends them our way). So feel free to tag your posts with tags you have registered.

Looks like Twitter is having problems with the ‘track’ command that we’re relying on to make this site work. Once Twitter gets that stuff figured out and we can count on receiving all messages we want, we should be good to go. In the mean time we’re going to keep plugging away and adding a few features. If you know who we can contact about the stability of the tracking feature, please let us know or leave a comment if you have any suggestions.

We’ve contacted Twitter and Aaron is working on getting them a log of the results of tracking terms. We seem to get a little bit of the tracked messages, but unfortunately not all of them. We’re working to solve this problem. Odd.