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Twitter “hashtags” (such as #www2008) have given users an easy way to tag Twitter messages or “tweets".

“Hashtag” convention has emerged from the Twitter user community and is not yet supported by Twitter itself (this was the case with @replies - a way to address other users and engage in conversations with them - which also emerged from users’ behaviour and only later was granted special handling by the microblogging service). This creates an opportunity for external services for using Twitter APIs to create websites for tracking conversations that use “hashtags".

#www2008 is a tag used by many participants of the WWW 2008 conference to tag their short messages. See below for some of these services which will show you twitter conversations and reports from the conference.

Hashtags: www2008 => http://www.hashtags.org/tag/www2008/

This site provides real-time tracking of Twitter #hashtags. It includes a nice “sparkline” showing the history of popularity of the given tag. This is an opt-in service and in order for your messages to be shown on it you must add @hashtags user as your contact on Twitter.

Summize Twitter conversation search => look for keywords www2008 and “www 2008″

Summize lets us perform keyword searches on Twitter conversations, updated almost in real-time. Using it you can find conversation missed by hashtags search. For example, when someone just used a phrase “WWW 2008″ or did not opt-in to hashtags search service.

There must be other services like this. It was interesting to follow conversations on Twitter and occasionally bump into other authors of short messages seen on Twitter. What someone could do now with these conversations (apart from reading them and maybe finding something interesting) is extract and visualize a community of Twitter message authors at WWW 2008.