@ Durf, the #’s are called Hashtags. If you put words after a hash, you can track its use frequency on http://hashtags.org – very helpful to track things in an event.

@ Josh, you talked about new users at the beginning of this post. I believe that providing easy to read informations for them could greatly reduce barriers of entry. New users should know that they’re not going to figure Twitter out right away, and the real fun won’t happen until they start participating in conversations, etc. This way, they’ll weather the withdrawal period (have anyone had some sort of a withdrawal from Twitter at some point?) and hopefully will find value by sticking around.

We have, on different levels, had experience with these. But new users haven’t. It will be helpful to build out a list of steps that might happen so they know what to expect, from point of entry, adoption, integration to late-night addiction

One decision folks have to make is whether or not they want to read everything by every person they follow. I find that most new Twitter users will do this… when they come online, they’ll go back and read everything that happened while they were away. This works great if you’re following 10 people, but once you develop a network of more than a few folks, this becomes totally impractical.

For me, I plug into Twitter when I get a chance, and when I’m away, I’m away. Perhaps I’ll miss something. Such is life.

I get around this by subscribing to the RSS feeds of about 15 “must read” Twitterfolks. This is less than 10% of my following list. Your list of “must read” people is going to be different than mine… but mine consists of a few folks that post high-quality messages, and I know that if I scan through them quickly I’ll pick up on anything important that happened while I was away.

Combining these “must read” RSS feeds along with targeted searches (using Tweetscan and a couple other tools) ensures that I see the important things without having to always be tuned into the Twitterstream 24×7.