FAQ > design decisions > Why not extend the hashtag syntax instead of defining a new syntax?
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Hashtags are specially indexed by Twitter search and are terminated by any non-alphanumeric character. This limits our ability to define a namespace mechanism in Twitter Data.
Furthermore, the use of hashtags is already highly conventional in the Twitter community and it is undesirable to define additional semantics for the use of the existing mechanism. We decided that converting hashtags to tuples instead of unary values was too much of a conflict with current hashtag conventions.
Last updated on May 22, 2009 by Todd Fast
