Is the hashtag going the way of the Dodo?

Angela Brown pointed me to the news that Twitter is toying with the idea of doing away with hashtags.

I sympathize. Every social media platform is adopting hashtags. They are becoming a new frontier for keyword stuffing. Even Google is making them up (and stuffing them into your Google+ posts). And comedians are mocking the ubiquitous hashtag.

Seriously. If you haven’t seen this, watch Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake mock the hashtag.

That said, hashtags can be a very useful tool.

I’ve written before about how to use hashtags wisely so that you are findable for the right reasons.

My reaction to the Twitter news is “meh.”

If Twitter makes it harder for tweets to be searchable using a # sign, then I’m sure the company will offer another tool to make its content discoverable. Maybe we can substitute an exclamation point (!exclamationpoint). Wouldn’t that be fun.

Without a way to track conversations over time, Twitter would become a whole lot less relevant. I don’t think Twitter’s going to self-destruct.

That’s my take. Now what say you?

Photo by Jeff/Teknokool (Flickr).