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Tweeting Hash Codes Batman

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

I’m not really a twitter user, I’ve got an account but while I’ll post a certain level of boring mundanity here I’m not into the recording the minute up to the minute stuff. I just don’t think it or I’m interesting enough and while blogging is probably a bit weird tweeting just goes over the line. Odds are I’ll get into it about the time something new takes over in microblogging: in the same way I bought a PDA when they were about to start the slide to obscurity as netbooks took off.

Anyway today I’ve been doing some work on Twitter at work to get a live feed of tweets onto a site during a streamed video from a conference. It would have been absolutely straightforward had I not run into something a bit obscure to do with hash codes. Our friends at the vinspired wanted a hash code #generationdigital. Fair enough everythings up and running to pick it up and display it on the site. Except it just wasn’t showing up. After some messing around we worked out that the presence of digital in the hash code for some reason stopped it being picked up by searches. #digital exists and works. #digitalXXX seems to be OK too. #XXXdigital or #XXXdigitalXXX is right out. #XXX-digital or #XXX_digital also work but just feel a bit clumsy. No idea why digital runs into a brick wall or if other words can do to. Anyway, since the hash code hadn’t been publicised in advance we decided to just use a different hash code.

One odd little discovery along the way though was a hashcode in German that left us a bit puzzled. Our, admitedly school boy quality translation, was that the hash code would have been #nocheesecakeprincess_digital. The mind boggles.

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