[Twitter] Why do...?

[Hiro]

Why do some users put "#" in front of things? What does it mean?
Fairly new to Twitter (joined 2 days ago).

+rep to answers

[Recursion]

It's a # tag, so you put a # when your talking about a subject like "#thesimpsons" or something

[omgDAN!]

http://www.hashtags.org/#

Click about

[Hiro]

Oooh, thanks!

[The Professor]

Whenever I watch something american they always call it a "pound" sign which confuses me

[edgates]

They're quite handy when you want to use http://search.twitter.com . So if you wanted to find out what people are saying about swine flu, you could type in #swineflu, providing they'd put that in their tweet

[ReviewDude]

Whenever I watch something american they always call it a "pound" sign which confuses me

I believe the technical name for the '#' (hash/pound) sign is an 'octothorpe'

[Jordulti]

Octothorpe sign.