Twitterers Celebrate a New Year by Looking Back 10 Years (And Talking About Themselves, Natch)

A certain class of digerati turns up their noses at the use of “hash tags” on Twitter. In the same way that they’d sniff at someone who uses an AOL (AOL) email address.

Their loss. For the rest of us, hash tags–that is, sticking a “#” sign before a phrase in your Twitter message–have become an entertaining and useful way to keep track of/play with memes that break out on the microblogging service.

Some of these are topical: Responses to news or things that Twitterers think should be news. Like the #Amazonfail outbreak last spring over the retailer’s supposed censorship of gay-themed books. Others are the equivalent of a party game played by people all over the world. I liked #oneletteroffmovies, for instance.

And now, at the end of the decade: #10yearsgo.

This one seems to have struck a chord with Twitterers, and that makes plenty of sense. Seeing what everyone else was up to a decade ago is great voyeuristic fun, and telling everyone what you were doing a decade ago is great narcissistic fun. That’s Twitter, no?

And in case you care, I’m with Alberto Santos on this one. I was spending a lot of time playing this song:

Prince – 1999

And if you’re still reading this far into the post: Thanks for reading what I had to say this year, and thanks for letting me know what’s on your mind, too. Gotta go make a lot of lasagna. See you in 2010.

[Image credit: Beverly & Pack]