Hashtags were developed on Twitter as a way to group tweets together without changing the basic service. A hashtag is created by prefixing a word with a # symbol. Hashtags allow users to search for and find tweets on the same topic. While some hashtags last for only a few days, others become integrated into other services and comment sections as a way to organize content by topic. Popular examples of hashtags include #followfriday used for sharing who you are following that week on Twitter and event hashtags that help attendees and organizers group related social media posts.

2. WHAT ARE HASHTAGS?In online computer systems terminology, a tag is a keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an Internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). Tags are generally chosen informally and personally by the item's creator or by its viewer, depending on the system. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.Hashtags were developed as a means to create "groupings" on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. The hash symbol is a convention borrowed primarily from IRC channels, and later from Jaiku's channels.

4. HOW DID HASHTAGS START?In 2003, the social bookmarking website Delicious provided a way for its users to add "tags" to their bookmarks (as a way to help find them later); Delicious also provided browseable aggregated views of the bookmarks of all users featuring a particular tag. Flickr allowed its users to add free-form tags to each of their pictures, that made the pictures highly searchable. The success of Flickr and the influence of Delicious popularized the concept, and other social softwarewebsites – such as YouTube, Technorati, and Last.fm – also implemented tagging. "Labels" in Gmail are similar to tags.

5. HOW TO USE HASHTAGS? Start using hashtags in your tweets, preceding key words. It can be helpful to do a little research first, to find out if the subject you're tweeting already has an established hashtag. Also, check Suggestions and Tips and Example Uses below for ettiquette and general usage.Finally, track other tweets on the subjects you're interested in (ie: those containing the appropriate hashtags) by browsing/searching at Hashtags.org, TwitterGroups, TweetChat, TweetGrid, Twitterfall, etc. You can set it up with RSS feeds as well.

7. HOW LONG WILL IT STAY?One phenomenon specific to the Twitter ecosystem are micro-memes, which are emergent topics for which a hashtag is created, used widely for a few days, then disappears.Other sites, such as Hashable, have adopted the hashtag to use for other reasons.The feature has been added to other, non-short-message-oriented services, such as the user comment systems on YouTube and Gawker Media

9. WHAT ARE SOME EXAMPLES?Within a blogMany blog systems allow authors to add free-form tags to a post, along with (or instead of) placing the post into categories. For example, a post may display that it has been tagged with baseball and tickets. Each of those tags is usually a web link leading to an index page listing all of the posts associated with that tag. The blog may have a sidebar listing all the tags in use on that blog, with each tag leading to an index page. there is no need to relocate the page within a complex hierarchy of categories when edited.For an eventAn official tag is a keyword adopted by events and conferences for participants to use in their web publications, such as blog entries, photos of the event, and presentation slides. Search engines can then index them to make relevant materials related to the event searchable in a uniform way. In this case, the tag is part of a controlled vocabulary.

10. BRIEF ABOUT HASHTAGShort messages on services such as Twitter or identi.ca may be tagged by including one or more hashtags: words or phrases prefixed with a hash symbol(#) with multiple words concatenated, such as those in:#RealAle is my favorite kind of #beer Then, a person can search for the string #RealAle and this tagged word will appear in the search engine results. These hashtags also show up in a number of trending topics websites, including Twitter's own front page. Such tags are case-insensitive, with CamelCase often used for readability.Definitions for some hashtags are available at hashtag.org. Hashtags were invented on Twitter by Chris Messina.Onephenomenon specific to the Twitter ecosystem are micro-memes, which are emergent topics for which a hashtag is created, used widely for a few days, then disappears. Other sites, such as Hashable, have adopted the hashtag to use for other reasons. The feature has been added to other, non-short-message-oriented services, such as the user comment systems on YouTube and Gawker Media; in the case of the latter, hashtags for blog comments and directly-submitted comments are used to maintain a more constant rate of user activity even when paid employees are not logged into the website. Real-time search aggregators such as Google Real-Time Search also support hashtags in syndicated posts, meaning that hashtags inserted into Twitter posts can be hyperlinked to incoming posts falling under that same hashtag; this has further enabled a view of the "river" of Twitter posts which can result from search terms or hashtags.

12. WHY USE HASHTAGS?Labeling and tagging are carried out to perform functions such as aiding in classification, marking ownership, noting boundaries, and indicating online identity. They may take the form of words, images, or other identifying marks. An analogous example of tags in the physical world is museum object tagging.

13. TWITTER HASHTAGOne of the most complex features of Twitter for new users to understand is the hashtag, a topic with a hash symbol (“#”) at the start to identify it. Twitter hashtags like #followfriday help spread information on Twitter while also helping to organize it. The hashtag is a favorite tool of conferences and event organizers, but it’s also a way for Twitter users to organize themselves: if everyone agrees to append a certain hashtag to tweets about a topic, it becomes easier to find that topic in search, and more likely the topic will appear in Twitter’s Trending Topics. So how do you disseminate and make sense of all this hashtag madness? By going through the art of the hashtag step-by-step, of course. This short guide details how to identify, track, use, and organize hashtags in an efficient and useful way.

14. VIDEO ON HASHTAGhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IELlKiRGv8

15. THANK YOU!GROUP MEMBERS-#ISHITA SHAH#MILONI SHAH#SHRUTI BAHNSUHALI#KRUTI BHRAMBHAT#DHAVAL SADRANI#DHAWAL DHAROD #BHUMICA JANI#NATAASHA BAKSHI