Alex Reid

The American Dialect Society has announced that Hashtag (a word or phrase preceded by a hash symbol (#), used on Twitter to mark a topic or make a commentary) is the 2012 Word of the Year.

The decision came at the society’s annual meeting in Boston where more than 250 linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, grammarians, historians, researchers, writers, editors, students, and other word fanatics gather.

“In the Twittersphere and elsewhere, hashtags have created instant social trends, spreading bite-sized viral messages on topics ranging from politics to pop culture.”

Other contenders include YOLO (acronym for “You only live once”), beardruff (dandruff from one’s beard), dancelexia (inability to pull off dance moves), and MOOC (acronym for “massive open online course”).

If you’ve been tracking Hurricane Sandy via social media or other sources, you might want to check out Instacane. It’s a mashup of photos from Instagram covering the hurricane, giving it a decidedly human touch.

The site is by Chris Ackermann and Peter Ng. It was originally developed last year for Hurricane Irene.

Apple’s attempt at a social network is officially dead.

Launched in late 2010, Ping was described as a social network for music, within iTunes allowing users to share music with each other. Instead, iTunes will get a makeover later this month, including an iCloud integration to show an user’s media content saved in Apple’s cloud storage service.

Thought to be dead years ago, MySpace released a teaser of its refreshed look (video).

In 2005, Myspace was the most popular social networking site in the world. It was sold at that time to Rupert Murdoch’s company for $580 million, who later regretted the purchase. Last summer, musician Justin Timberlake and Specific Media purchased Myspace for $35 million.

So far the new site looks like Pinterest for musicians.

Despite the popularity, I was never a member of MySpace. Among many usability farts, I found the auto-play of music to be particularly annoying. Plus I wasn’t a musician. But now I might give it a chance. It looks slick and user friendly. I just hope it’s privacy friendly.

It isn’t far off..