Earlier tonight the world learned of Whitney Houston’s death. Little over three hours afterwards, the story is all over the internet: on the BBC news website, on the Rolling Stone website with celebrity tweets gathered on Mashable too.
The immediate obituaries clearly show these were planned and written beforehand, with ABC’s 3 page piece being a good example for this.
That aside, I’ve been monitoring twitter since about 15 minutes after AP’s breaking tweet about Whitney’s death and was intrigued by the range of hashtags used.
Acording to Twitter a hashtag “is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet” and “it was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages.”
Twitter Fan Wiki goes into more detail – their content still applies although the page was last updated over a year ago.
Now when such an event ends up taking more than one hashtag I inevitably ask myself: (1) if this doesn’t defy the very basic purpose of hashtags, (2) why use hashtags for tracking purposes in the first place, when a search will find all related tweets anyway and (3) which one should I use, if I was to tweet about it?
Does it sound familiar?
I put together the storify below to show the evolution of hashtags relating to Whitney Houston’s death throughout the night. I’ve left aside the ones that weren’t explicitly related to the news, such as #foreveramazing, #inspiration, #gonebutnotforgotten, #rip, etc. Please add your own in the comments below or let me know what I’ve missed @t30d0ra.
http://storify.com/t30d0ra/hashtags-whithey-houston-s-death