Tags

At identi.ca and any other StatusNet installation there are various kinds of tags to categorize your notices. There are the hash tags marked with a #, then there are the group or bang tags !. But there are more. Did you know that you can tag yourself? And your friends? Even group your friends and send notices to such a group?

In general you can use the 26 common letters from the Latin alphabet and numbers in your tags. The support of internationalised letters (aka UTF8) is on it's way. See Ticket 693 in StatusNet trac.


 * valid tags: #thIS #is #a #Valid #TAG #123
 * umlaute work too #Überraschung
 * invalid tags: #€uro

Hash Tags #
Hash tags are the way to categorise your notice. If you speak about a specific subject, just place a # in front of the word and it will be counted as tag. Hash tags are automatically linked to an overview of all notices that were tagged with that specific hash tag. Further more, there is a tag cloud accessible from the public timeline displaying the currently most used ones.

Each user has his own tagspace, making it easy to find notices you tagged with certain keywords. From a user's page, clicking on one of the words in the tagcloud will get you there.

Depending on the platform you're using the server admin may enabled a plugin that displays the content of the hash tags wiki at wikia.

You can subscribe to a RSS1 feed for any given hash tag.

Friend Tags @#
For your private use, you can tag your friends. These tags are used (a) for sorting your subscriptions/subscribers and (b) as personal group which is addressable in notices. When you type @#family hello you'll send hello to all the people that you have tagged as family.

Self Tags
In your account settings (Account ➙ Profile tab) you can tag yourself or, better yet, your profile. These tags are displayed right below your bio in the profile. The tags are linked together, so you may find somebody who's interested in the same stuff as you.

Peopletags
http://status.net/wiki/People_tags

Group Tags !
Groups are like mailing lists or chat rooms where you can talk about topics (marked with a hash tag). See the Groups page for more information. If you are a member of a group, you can post a notice to a group, using the bang tag !group name.

The bang tag is counted as a hash tag for collecting hash tags and counts for the tag cloud, even if you are not a member of the group. You do not need to use a hash tag with the same name as the group name, that only costs you characters and does not count twice for the tag cloud.

You can subscribe to a RSS feed for any given group.

Hash vs. Bang
Please consider twice before posting to a notice to a group. Not everyone wants to know that you are writing a program in a specific language, or that you are lying in the garden in your hometown f.e.. Drawing the borderline between hash and bang is not always easy.

One way to decide may be that you can discuss many subjects (hash) belonging to a topic (bang). Or talking on topic (bang) and off topic (hash).