Ever wonder what hashtag to use for your tweets?  Want to know who is mentioned or tweets frequently on a topic?

Me too.

Tag-o-Matic is a free, simple program that allows you to search for a term or terms that are related to your upcoming tweet and it shows you the most frequently used hashtags in the matching tweets. It works on Mac or Windows (or Linux, for that matter).

When you run it, it looks like this:

You start the program by double-clicking the file tagomatic.jar (instructions on where to download it are later in the article).  This is a Java program, which is why it has a bit of a strange naming convention. You have to have a relatively recent version Java (1.6 or newer) to run it, but almost everyone does.  If it doesn’t start, it’s probably that.  You can email me and I’ll try to puzzle it out (or see if I can do something on my end).

You enter a search term in the “Search For” text field.  I have given an example here of obama OR romney — I want to be fair and balanced!  You press “Search for Hashtags” and the search begins.  It will retrieve either about a week’s worth of Tweets or up to about 10,000 most recent Tweets — whatever is smaller.  This takes a little bit of time, and you can watch the hashtags go up and down in popularity as the search engine goes backwards in time.

If you press Search Syntax Help, it will give you various ways to construct your searches.

When the program runs out of Tweets (or hits its limit), a small window tells you it’s finished.  You can hit the same button you used to start the search while the search is underway to stop the search prematurely.

Click on the following link to download the file tagomatic.jar and save it some place you’ll be able to find it again.

If the program breaks or doesn’t work or you want something different, drop me a line at charles@mcguinness.us.  Have fun, though!  You’ll be a hash tag wizard in no time! Which is exactly like being a pin ball wizard, except the part with Pete Townshend singing about you.  And the part about being blind.  And the part about …