Yesterday’s #ideaschat was co-hosted by Hashtracking, an analytics platform that allows users to track trending topics in real time.  Hashtags, the brainchild of former Google employee and Twitter user Chris Messina (“the hash godfather,” according to The New York Times), allow you to group ideas and topics into conversations, like #ideaschat.  But they’ve also become their own language of sorts.  Users often try to out-clever each other when creating new hashtags, and a hashtag can be used to encapsulate a complex idea in a short block of text.

Could hashtags replace German as the go-to language for packaging multi-layered ideas in bite-size text? Maybe, maybe not—we’re not quite sure what the hashtag for schadenfreude would be.  But the conversation yesterday did distill their appeal: