There has been some confusion about the hashtags registration process. Why do we require you to follow the bot account? Why can you just parse the public feed like other sites do? I am here to answer these queries.

Why do we require you to follow the bot account?

It boils down to the fact that we want hashtags to be an opt-in service. If you don’t want the bot to look at your messages, it didn’t. We also figure this would develop a more active user base. I mean how many people are going to use hashtags unless they know about the site? Another benefit, that we didn’t realize at the time, was that this process allowed us to handle gradual growth rather than just letting open the flood gates of twitter.  So that is why we have you follow the bot.

Why can’t you just parse the public feed like other sites do?

Simple, it just doesn’t really work. Have you ever looked at the public feed page and tried refreshing? Even if you click twice in a row, the results are almost always completely different. What that means is you inevitably miss some messages. In order to do this reliably we’d have to have multiple bots hammering the public xml feed and parsing those. Parsing xml, in general, is really slow too. We made the decision to not hammer twitter’s servers and instead took the passive approach of parsing the bot’s xmpp feed.

What’s next?

Well the beta version we’re working on runs off of the public jabber feed. So we’ll be processing every single message that comes in. The only problem is that it requires a lot more computing power. We’re processing a whole lot more messages. The beta site, feature wise, is pretty complete. Right now Ben is working on optimizing our database calls and caching the hell out of everything. Our biggest problem, if you want to call it that, is that we’re getting to much client work. Since there’s no current value proposition in hashtags itself, it’s hard to dedicate too much time to it. Any suggestions or question you have post in comments and we’ll give them a look.

We all try to keep the signal to noise ration down quite a bit when communicating. Unfortunately, I think most of us are usually on the receiving end of it. I have tried to keep tabs on my communicating by asking myself the questions: Is this the right outlet? Is this the right context?

Normally I will send out a tweet with just a little bit of information rather than whip out Wordpress and goto town writing a blog post because what I have to say doesn’t need to be elaborated on.

I do not have a blog of my own. I have a tumble log, but that’s nothing more than an aggregate of what I publish. So I publish in different blogs that have to do with the topic I’m writing about - be it politics, culture, or technology (here).

So after being unsatisfied with our current Twitter/Blog/RSS scheme, I came up with an interesting idea to weave our tweets into the flow for Downtown Cartel as asides. Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress, introduced asides to the blogging community a couple of years ago. I found that asides were exactly the thing that microblogging platforms like Twitter and Pownce tried to be but were handled differently - mainly by method of distribution.

I’m still trying to figure out how to pull off asides so that they work with Twitter, Wordpress and Twitter-Tool. I’m not certain that this can be done, but we’ll see.

This will be the first in a series of posts about the pending release of our complete rewrite of Hashtags. Why did we rewrite it? Simple, it started out as an experiment and the traffic has grown. What start out as a thought experiment with two people now has a team of four behind it. Unfortunately two of the four know ruby and the person who originally wrote it developed it in python. In order for all of us to contribute we found in necessary to move it over to ruby, specifically Merb. This allows us to a better work flow to optimize the site as well as work on new features, which we have a lot planned.

So what can you expect from the new site? Well for one, it’ll be faster. We’re using memcache to cache most of the pages as fragments and also caching slow running methods, like creating the nifty graphs. So hopefully we won’t see the slow downs that have happened on the current site. What else? Well we’re now receiving the xmpp public feed, this means we’re now tracking every message. There have been some ui tweaks as well. We’ve layout out the messages on the main page a little different, we think for the better. We’ve also changed up the navigation to make it easier for us as we start adding features.

The other big news is now you can have Hashtags user accounts. Why is this good? It’ll will allow you to track certain tags and then have a custom page that will display message from those tags. We’re also looking at the ability to recommend tags or users based on which tags you are tracking, so look forward to that.

We’ll keep you updated as we get closer to releasing it, we’re shooting towards the end of may for now. Also we’re looking for some beta testers, so let us know if you’re interested.

Downtown Bryan, TX recently stepped it up a notch when our good friends over at Square One Bistro began announcing the lunch special and soup of the day over twitter. Yes, every day around 11:15, I get a little update with what’s being served for lunch.

I think this is a great way for non-tech businesses to have somewhat persistent contact with their users, err, patrons. I’m sure plenty of restaurants have an RSS feed of different things like events and specials - it’s time they move them to Twitter.

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.