Twitter appears to be testing a feature that will better organize its chaotic world of hashtags.
The new feature, seen by The Wall Street Journal in the Twitter app for iOS, added an expanded label to some hashtag searches such as #tbt (Throwback Thursday), #smh (Shaking My Head) or #oitnb (TV series “Orange Is The New Black”). The labeling gives the hashtags a sense of legitimacy and order as related to a certain event or subject.
Other hashtags noticed by WSJ that appeared to have legitimate associations to it included #lol (“League of Legends,” the popular online game), #manutd (Manchester United, the soccer team), #hhldn (Hacks/Hackers London, a small media/technology event) and #rt (stated to be Russia Today, rather than retweet).
It wasn’t clear how these labels were generated. Some included an option for users to rate their accuracy. Many hashtags, such as #MH17 for Malaysia Airlines 3786.KU 0.00% Flight 17, didn’t trigger the feature. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment on the supposed new feature.
Like many social networks, Twitter often tests out experimental new features on select groups. Earlier this year some users noticed the word “retweet” in their apps had been replaced with “share,” and the recent desktop profile design was also tested on random users before its wider release.
The new hashtag definition feature could be designed to help ease new users into the social network, which has struggled to grow its user base in recent years—though it showed stronger growth the second quarter of this year.
Some analysts consider the service to be hard to use. To address that issue, Twitter has focused on making it easier for new users to find content that is of specific interest to them faster. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has said it plans to do this by better organizing Twitter around topics and events.
One of the experimental hashtags viewed by The Journal appears to prompt users to easily find users using the same hashtag nearby. In the event of an accident or some other kind of hyper local news event, organizing tweets in a neighborhood by a single hashtag could theoretically make it easier for users to discover relevant information about the accident faster.