If you’re a tweep, or Twitter user, you can post your thoughts, tell friends what you’re doing and follow interesting people. Twitter users mark their posts – called tweets – with abbreviations that pack information into 140 characters. Some of these signs are the same shorthand you use in texts and email messages. Others are called hashtags, Twitter’s way of marking tweets so they add up on your timeline to constitute trending topics: subjects that dominate the conversation on Twitter because many users tweet about them at the same time. While hashtags aren’t unique to Twitter, the service has its own hashtag traditions. Writer Bio
