A couple of years ago, when hashtags first started appearing in my Twitter timeline, I just sort of shrugged them off. I couldn’t see their value through the visual damage they imposed. Even today, I have a hard time #taking #anyone #seriously when they use more than one or two #hashtags for a #single #tweet – mostly because they just look bad.

Daniel Victor recently wrote about this, saying he believes “a tweet free of hashtags is more pleasing to the eye, more easily consumed, and thus more likely to be retweeted (which is a proven way of growing your audience)”.

Now here’s where I have to admit I have come to realize three important facts about hashtags:

1. Hashtags are used by both users and marketers. Like it or not, you cannot deny usage of hashtags is on the rise. The most compelling thing about this is that hashtags weren’t created as a marketing tactic, yet their use has demanded marketer adoption.

2. Hashtags do have great potential. Even in their most basic form – for taxonomy – hashtags can trump inferral through machines. No one knows better what they’re saying than the person saying it.

3. Hashtags actually do increase engagement. It may be tough to recognize through subjectivity, but the reality is, hashtags provide a mechanism for easier discovery, encourage brevity, promote a single key binding for disparate data, and even help inject tone/personality.

Those three factors are so strong, in fact, that I co-founded a company that basically attempts to reconcile them with my inherent distain for the way hashtags look. At Tagboard, we’re building tools that help both users and marketers use hashtags in a way that benefits both parties.

My opinion of hashtags is admitted bias, and equally manic. The thrust of my argument against hashtags is rooted in my design sense, while the engineer in me sees the yet-unrealized potential they have. Meanwhile, Sensible Sean sees hashtags as just harmless and fun.

If you want to make something new, start with understanding. […] The making isn’t the hard part, in fact. It’s the seeing. […] When everyone has the same Mac and the same internet, the difference between hackneyed graphic design and extraordinary graphic design is just one thing—the ability to see.

This promotes a purpose-driven approach to creating. Rather than focusing on tactics, this advice tells readers to dig deeper – to understand.

His post is titled “How to make a website: a tactical guide for marketers”, and if ever there was a list of bad starts of blogs posts, that one has to rank up there. I’ll explain why in a bit.

The post outlines various techniques Godin uses to make a website – including copy/pasting elements from other sites in Keynote. Obviously, this isn’t a website, so the last step in Godin’s tactical guide is “Hand the Keynote doc to your developers and go away…”

His expertise in marketing notwithstanding, this advice for how to ‘make a website’ is terrible. I appreciate Godin’s attempt at demystifying the process, and I recognize that giving practical advice for how marketers can work with their teams has great potential benefit. However, he would have done better to avoid the use of the words ‘make’ or ‘build’ altogether, and instead outlined how marketers can learn to make purposeful, high-level design decisions.

Godin argues that most of the web is built by amateurs. And in what could be considered a followup post, goes on to say the “best professionals love it when a passionate amateur shows up” – and, of course, uses a couple of comparisons, like farmers and automotive mechanics.

The problem with Godin’s perspective (and comparisons) is he thinks marketers are builders. He says “professional farmers don’t begrudge the backyard gardener his tomato harvest. That’s silly.” And, he’s right, because the backyard gardener is just that: a gardener. If, however, that gardener was a marketer who didn’t know anything about the science of growing vegetables, but who was growing them (in spite of himself) and selling them on the open market, and competing for market- and mind-share with reputable farmers…

Well, let’s just say I disagree that marketers ‘make websites’. They may be part of the process, but to suggest they can just throw together a slide deck and hand it off to a developer, and say they’re ‘building the web’ … that is silly. Marketers are liars, not makers.

The choice is between investing in employees or entrepreneurs

What each of these sites argues, implicitly, is that the web norms that we’ve evolved over the past decade err toward crassness and ugliness. That advertising — which all these sites lack, and which is proving to be less-than-sufficiently-remunerative for lots of “quality” online media — is an uninvited guest in our reading experiences. That the free-for-all of a comments thread creates broken-windows-style chaos. That the madness of the web might be tamed through better tools and better platforms. That the web’s pressure to Always Keep Posting New Stuff leads to a lot of dumb stuff being posted.

Just in case you haven’t been following along, he’s talking specifically about App.net, Branch, and Medium; all recently introduced.

I have a great deal of respect for Siegler, and usually agree with everything he says, but I don’t think he’s accurate in assuming Twitter Cards are going to be used as a tool for revenue. Granted, he would probably know better than I do, but I haven’t read or seen any official word from Twitter to suggest they’re going to attempt to monetize Cards.

While Twitter Cards do signal a(nother) shift in the core product, I don’t think it’s a shift motivated solely by revenue – at least not directly. Instead, I’m guessing the new Cards are designed to optimize Twitter’s product usage – to enhance the user experience. (Which, incidentally, does leads to more revenue, of course.)

Twitter is a great messaging platform; good for notifications, alerts, and short, one-way broadcasts. That means users, while they may use Twitter often, are bouncing in and out all day long. By contrast, Facebook users stay on facebook.com all day long – clicking around, viewing photos, playing games, Liking, Poking, etc. Hypothetically, that would make Facebook a better platform for advertising, and I think that’s why we’re seeing the shift to make Twitter a ‘stay here, don’t leave’ product. They’ve already proven their ads work better, now they just want to scale, multiply, and optimize the affect.

Neither MG Siegler or Marco Arment think it’ll work. Marco says:

I just don’t see a social platform growing quickly enough to overcome the network-effect barrier when it’s not free to join, especially when the goal is effectively to replace an existing, free, extremely successful network.

He goes on to qualify that he hopes he’s wrong. I agree with both he and Siegler, but also hope I’m wrong.

Regardless, though, I don’t think an advertising-free social platform is a pipe-dream. There are other growth models that circumvent the barrier Marco is talking about. The bottom line is: the [perceived] value has to outweigh the [perceived] costs. And there are tricks to tipping the scales.

For what it’s worth, I’d love it if you’d join me in backing the project.