Pretty much yeah, as well as twitter search (without having to opt-in, which I believe hashtags.org still requires). But the author's main point seemed to be th

Pretty much yeah, as well as twitter search (without having to opt-in, which I believe hashtags.org still requires). But the author's main point seemed to be that hashtags are a solution for easily filtering and tagging tweets appropriately. For example, I was at macworld last week and while I didn't hashtag any tweets, it would be a lot easier for people to filter if I did tag them with something like #mwsf09, instead of tweeting something related without actually mentioning "mwsf" or "macworld" in the tweet, forcing them to deal with the subsequent issues (i.e. not being able to filter them out or vice versa, not being able to search for it easily...). (Not that I necessarily want to see twitter-side filtering and grouping and permissions, I don't know that I want to given that I love the simplicity of twitter as-is unless twitter can implement it unobtrusively.)