Items up for sale through Twitter include American Express gift cards, Amazon Kindle Fire tablets, and Donna Karan jewelry, according to the Journal. Twitter has not yet responded with a comment on the partnership, but a press release from American Express explains how the hashtag purchases will work:

“American Express Cardmembers who sync their eligible Cards at sync.americanexpress.com/twitter and tweet special #hashtags can buy American Express Gift Cards and products from Amazon, Sony, Urban Zen and Xbox 360. American Express’ proprietary Card Sync technology powers the experience. Card Sync first launched on Twitter last March to deliver couponless savings to Cardmembers who tweet special offer #hashtags from merchants.”

Most of Twitter’s monetization efforts so far have come through marketing and advertising, such as promoted tweets which now cost up to $200,000 a day, but this partnership that allows purchases through tweets could move the company toward e-commerce opportunities as well. In March, an American Express partnership allowed consumers to link their cards and Twitter accounts to then receive coupons through the service.

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According to Wion, the fast-food chain’s troubles began after it launched a 24-hour campaign to insert promoted tweets into the streams of Twitter users. The campaign was intended to share happy farmer stories and featured two keyword hashtags. The company used these hashtags in its tweets and also paid for them to appear at the top of the results when a user searched for those terms.

The campaign proceeded uneventfully until 2pm last Wednesday when McDonald’s switched from its first hash-tag #MeetTheFarmers to its second one #McDStories.

“Within an hour, we saw that it wasn’t going as planned,” said Wion. “It was negative enough that we set about a change of course.”

Even though the company used the hashtag only twice, a legion of critics pounced on #McDStories to tell their own tales of weed or animal cruelty. Some offered crass personal accounts like that of @MuzzaFuzza who wrote “I haven’t been to McDonalds in years, because I’d rather eat my own diarrhea.”

The hashtag continues to take on a Twitter life of its own — most recently as a social media parable for marketers.

If there’s any consolation for McDonald’s, it’s that the company’s original positive message (“When u make something w/pride, people can taste it”) continues to appear at the top of the search results. This is happening not because the company is paying for it to stay there (as I speculated earlier) but because of the tweet’s popularity.

“It’s what we call a “Top Tweet” — a Tweet that is getting extremely high engagement when people do a search for a term. These are chosen algorithmically,” explained Twitter spokesman Matt Graves, adding that any tweet that is promoted at the time will be clearly marked in yellow.

The #McDStories will subside eventually but there remains the question of whether McDonald’s could have done anything differently.

According to Wion, McDonald’s carefully selects the words or phrases used to describe its promoted tweets but that it’s inevitable both “fans and detractors will chime in” (although the latter appear to have a clear majority in this case..)

His point appears to be that a certain amount of social media blowback is unavoidable if a company is a lightning rod in the first place.

The episode also shows that, in the case of Twitter, a hashtag released into the wild can’t be re-captured:

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Eye-C’s app taps into your Facebook friend stream, and also allows to connect with other Eye-C users directly and see what media they’ve been sharing. Users can for example search for hash tag, like #occupywallst, and then play a steady stream of videos about the movement.

Of course, the idea to use hash tags for collaborative playlists works both ways: Users can also simply tag something they’ve found online, share it with other Eye-C users as well as people on Facebook and Twitter, and hopefully inspire other people add to it. “Just tag something with a descriptive term, and it becomes a list,” Eye-C CEO Ari Birger said when I talked to him on the phone a couple of days ago. Users can also filter hash tags by friends or simply browse all the media their Facebook contacts have been sharing.

Birger also shared an interesting backstory about Eye-C: The startup initially whipped up a personal media player application called Eyecon, which can still be downloaded from the Android market. The app put a heavy emphasis on DLNA, making it possible to stream content stored on a local hard drive straight to a TV set with DLNA-support while controlling the playback on your handset. However, the interface simply didn’t have mass market appeal, explained Birger, which is why the company decided to fold the technology into Eye-C.

The result is that Eye-C still supports DLNA playback, which allows users to play those hashtag playlists on a TV screen, provided they own a DLNA-certified TV set or connected device. Think of it as Airplay for hashtags, if you will.

Birger told me that the company eventually wants to bring Eye-C to other platforms as well. “We started with mobile because it creates an easy to carry controller,” he said.

One thing that’s still missing from Eye-C is a closer Twitter integration. Currently, users can share videos with their Twitter followers, but not actually follow hash tags bubbling up. I’ve been told that this will be added to the app by the end of fall. I also had some issues getting the app to sync with Facebook on some of my Android devices, and I sometimes found Eye-C a bit too complex to navigate, with too many options available to browse media, friends lists and so on.

Still, I have to admit that the idea impressed me: Hash tags have become a great way of crowdsourced curation, and tapping into that to program your media playlists is a pretty clever idea, especially around any current events.

Check out a few screenshots of the app below:

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Judging from early tweet counts, it looks like Sheen was #winning one more time: Social media monitoring company Visible Technologies counted more than twice as many tweets about the roast when compared to those about Two and a Half Men:

That result is even more impressive if you consider that Charlie Sheen himself was among those tweeting about his former TV show. But Comedy Central heavily promoted the social media angle of its roast, including the official hashtag #SheenRoast. And it looks like the network also had some help from Amy Schumar, whose appearance dominated the conversation on Twitter:

The drama around Sheen’s very public dismissal from the CBS show may be all but over now that Warner Bros. and the star are closing in on a settlement, but the tweet count from last night shows that Sheen still has a lot of clout with Twitter users. The actor utilized the service heavily to promote a number of unscripted live online shows in March, and and he now has close to five million followers on Twitter.

One could of course argue that the typical CBS viewer may be less tempted to tweet than his Comedy Central counterpart, but the network may see an overall social media bost from Kutcher being on the show as well: The actor currently has around 7.6 million Twitter followers.

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Starting with the Season 9 premiere of Project Runway on Thursday, July 28, fans will be able to vote for their favorite contestants on the show during each episode, with a $10,000 prize going to the winner at the end of the season. To determine which contestants fans are most passionate about, A+E has established a personal hashtag for each contestant, and will be aggregating “votes” based on how many Tweets are received for each contestant.

A promotional video provided by A&E explaining how the voting will work is embedded below:

A+E Digital is working with social media measurement firm Mass Relevance to count the votes and to filter out vote spam, ensuring users don’t try to game the system by setting up dummy accounts or writing scripts to pound Twitter’s servers with Fan Favorite votes. (Mass Relevance was also recently tapped to provide data from President Obama’s recent Twitter Town Hall.)

The results will be posted on the Project Runway website, but they will also be updated weekly and will air within episodes to let viewers know which contestant is leading week-by-week. In addition, Project Runway hopes to drive awareness of the contest by including the designer’s hashtag each time his or her name is displayed on-screen.

The Fan Favorite winner doesn’t have to be one of the finalists for the show, according to A+E SVP of Digital Media Evan Silverman. That’s important, because it’s often third- or fourth- or even fifth-place contestants that most resonate with viewers. Even after someone has been eliminated, he or she will still be eligible to win the Fan Favorite prize, and viewers can still vote for that contestant.

Creating a social media tie-in like Fan Favorite is just one way A+E hopes to increase viewership of the already-popular TV show. In an email, Silverman wrote, “There is no doubt that if you can generate a significant level of buzz and awareness through social media platforms then that engagement translates to awareness for your show.”

For a show like Project Runway, which already has a large base of viewers tweeting during the show, creating this type of contest is just one way to boost awareness and engagement even further. Silverman writes:

“We think that by leveraging Twitter in a season-long, real-time voting contest, we’ll be able to increase the level of engagement significantly… and to let the fans give their favorite designer a great prize: $10,000.”

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On August 23, 2007, the Twitter hashtag was born. Invented by Chris Messina (then with the consulting firm Citizen Agency, now an open web advocate for Google), the first tweet with a hashtag read as follows: “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?”

Today, hashtags make tweets more meaningful and findable, traits that many users appreciate. No conference or speech is complete without a hashtag these days, binding together the ad-hoc community of observers and their pithy comments and memorable quotes. Another prominent use of hashtags is to generate memes — the sort of stuff you would see on a chain-letter quiz — for instance, #10yearsago was popular around Jan. 1 of this year, when people remembered how they welcomed Y2K, and #ff is popular every Friday, when users recommend other accounts they like to follow. Hashtags are also a prominent form of Twitter humor, offering the author the chance to contradict what they’re saying or poke fun — for instance, a friend of mine often uses the hashtag #mylifeissohard. There’s also, of course, plenty of hashtag spam, and plenty of Justin Bieber. (The site “What the Trend” is a trove for this stuff.)

According to Twitter, 11 percent of tweets now contain hashtags. This is on a platform that sees more than 50 million tweets per day. Depending on how geeky or meme-y your user base is, the hashtag count certainly goes up. Alessio Signorini, a PhD candidate at the University of Iowa, recently found 15 percent of 275 million randomly selected tweets contained hashtags. Messina said there are hashtags in probably 30 percent of the tweets from people he follows.

Back in the spring summer of 2007, Messina proposed the hashtag as a way to group conversations on Twitter, which was then an incredibly simple messaging service (of course, it still is, but a lot has changed). The inspiration for the convention came from channels on IRC and the Twitter competitor Jaiku. The # would denote metadata about a tweet, rather than the content of the tweet itself. Messina called them “channel tags.” He wrote via email today, “In the beginning people really hated them! People didn’t understand why we needed hashtags, and the biggest complaint was that people just didn’t like how they looked.”

Though hashtags might have been a little ugly and awkward, they were useful from the outset. Back then Twitter offered a push-based service called Track (since discontinued) where users could set up notifications on any term, and that worked particularly well with hashtags. What the company didn’t offer was search (it later bought Summize to fix this problem), and tracking hashtags was a sort of substitute, helping users find and organize tweets. Hashtags are also “folksonomic,” meaning they give organization that is ad hoc, with no rigid structure or approval system.

Messina's mockup of recent and popular channel tags for Twitter executives.

Messina pitched hashtags to Twitter’s execs back in the day, he said, and even mocked up a couple of pages that showed popular hashtags (still called channels) the exact same way Twitter treats trending topics today. But the Twitter team deemed them too nerdy, and said they’d prefer to use machine learning to filter tweet topics, according to Messina.

Adoption of the hashtag initially seemed to be mostly by Messina himself, who used them profusely to mark where he was tweeting from and what it was about, until around October of ’07. During the San Diego forest fires, when people tweeting about the emergency used the same hashtag at Messina’s urging and by following the example set by other citizen journalists.

Around the same time, Republicans seeking to keep Congress in session to vote on an energy bill started tweeting with the hashtag #dontgo. In Messina’s recollection, that was hashtag’s big break “out of the geekosphere.”

Messina said that in retrospect, he’s especially proud of inventing hashtags “because they’re a hack and they prove that simple solutions are often the best ways to solve a problem, rather than waiting for a technology solution.”

Ever the tinkerer, Messina now thinks hashtags are overused and that there should be different types of metadata markers, for instance /via, /cc and /by. Those have been christened “slashtags,” but they haven’t caught on quite as well.

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