Can We Agree On A Short Twitter Hashtag For Nextgen Sequencing?

Question

[Samuel Lampa]

There is no real consensus on a short, non-hijacked hashtag to use for "High-Througput sequencing" / "Next Generation Sequencing" on social media sites such as twitter and identi.ca. What I have seen mostly used is:

• #NextGenSequencing (too long)
• #NGS (hijacked)

... which tend to make them kind of useless.

So, can we please suggest/vote on different alternatives here? (Please one tag per answer, to allow for meaningful voting).

UPDATE Oct 20, 2011: By majority voting, #deepseq was the winner, so, let's see if we can get people to be using the #deepseq tag! (otherwise, we'll have to bring up the discussion again).

UPDATE Oct 21, 2011: I did withdraw the "correct answer" mark now, since there is two equal winners currently, and probably it doesn't really make sense for me to give a "correct answer", as consensus might change as more sees the poll, and it also comes up to what people will actually use on twitter. (Thanks for all the nice suggestions though, folks!)

[lh3]

I do not use Twitter, so this question is less relevant to me. But #deepseq seems too limited to me. There are a lot more we can do with NGS.

[Chris Evelo]

On BioStar people vote for nice answers not for hashtags. Casey's answer may even have gotten extra votes because he agreed to like another answer more himself. If you want to vote I think you should use twitter and see which hashtag gets most (re)tweets.

[Peter]

I don't mind getting the odd #NGS tagged post about the National Gardens Scheme http://ngs.org.uk/ ... other than that the "hijacking" hasn't been too bad.

[Peter]

OK, it does seem to have got worse of later. The nature of Twitter hastags :(

[David]

And the tag goes to...?

[Samuel Lampa]

... to #deepseq

[Samuel Lampa]

Well, I tend to agree actually ... but hmm ... I was looking for a community consensus, so ... hmm ...

[Peter]

Calling #deepseq as the majority preference may have been premature (and I don't like it either).

[Casey Bergman]

Not that I care about this issue personally, but stating what is majority preference depends on how you calculate it - including or excluding downvotes?

[Samuel Lampa]

I'm redrawing the "correct answer" mark now, since there is two equal winners currently. I don't even know if it makes sense for me to give a "correct answer". As Chris states above, it's more about what people will actually start using on twitter ...

[Samuel Lampa]

(And as Casey is hinting at as well ... being hard to make a fair choice)

[Samuel Lampa]

(And as Casey is hinting at as well ... being hard to make a fair choice) .... and @Peter: Yeah, I was obviously a bit quick there.

[Bioinfosm]

I have not used twibes much, but gave a go to this ngs twibe .. so any tweet with #ngs from a member, gets logged in the twibe which i think is cool thoughts from others on that being workable? http://www.twibes.com/group/ngs

why did you say #NGS is hijacked?

[Samuel Lampa]

Maybe things have improved ... at the time when I posted this, there were lots of noise for the #NGS hashtag.

Answer 1

[Larry_Parnell]

A shorter tag is better and so I would offer #NGSeq. There are only 2 Tweets for this tag as of this moment.

[Samuel Lampa]

I tend to think this one is the most realistic at the moment ... would imagine 99% of folks to look for something around "NextGen" when searching for the right tag ...

[Samuel Lampa]

I tend to think this one is the most realistic at the moment ... would imagine 99% of folks to look for something around "NextGen" when searching for the right tag ... I mean, maybe it's a too big task to both change the accepted term of use, and the twitter tag, both at the same time?

Answer 2

[Casey Bergman]

how about #deepseq, since we are already beyond NGS and onto next-NGS, so "next" generation sequencing is something of dated term, while deep sequencing will be with us for many years to come.

[Larry_Parnell]

I agree +1, but still see "NextGen" everywhere that this term will not soon be banished from the lexicon.

[Haibao Tang]

not necessarily all studies deepseq, nor is PACBIO deep at the moment - but other than these, great word

[Gareth Palidwor]

Nonsense; the term Next Generation Sequencing" is as timeless as "New Wave Music".

[Samuel Lampa]

As Alastair Kerr's post hints at, there's just so many types of "seq", and as mentioned above, not all "seq" is even very "deep", so I wonder whether "bio" wouldn't be the "least common denominator", so "#bioseq"?

[Samuel Lampa]

As Alastair Kerr's post hints at, there's just so many types of "seq", and as mentioned above, not all "seq" is even very "deep", so I wonder whether "bio" wouldn't be the "least common denominator", so "#bioseq"? (Feel free to add if anybody else likes it. Don't like answernig own q)

[Samuel Lampa]

Ok, majority seems to be quite clear about this one, so here goes the mark!

[Samuel Lampa]

... so, let's see if we can get people to be using the #deepseq tag! (otherwise, we'll have to bring up the discussion again)

[Samuel Lampa]

(Have withdrawn as correct answer. Not planning to give mark from here on. See update on main post for details)

Answer 3

[Chris Evelo]

Since none of them makes us happy or even smile... What about #GATACA? The movie (entitled GATTACA) doesn't cause that much noise, and it is easy to remember since it is different from everything you thought it might be. I know it doesn't discriminate from Sanger sequencing, but how often do you need that as a hashtag anyway.

[Alastair Kerr]

Nice idea: perhaps even #GATC would be suitably abstract

Answer 4

[pmenzel]

HTSeq as suggested improvement over #HTS

Answer 5

[pmenzel]

I think #HTS (=High Throughput Seq) is easy enough :-)

[Samuel Lampa]

Unfortunately there seems to be a lot of noise for #hts on twitter (see http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23hts), but how about #htseq?

[Casey Bergman]

+1 I think Peter's suggestion is better since it also avoids 'next" in fewer characters.

[Samuel Lampa]

If anybody else likes it (HTSeq), feel free to add as a proper answer (Don't like to answer my own questions, and it was not really my idea anyway, just a variation on Peters').

[pmenzel]

yeah the #hts seems really busy on twitter, #htseq seems to be the much better option.

Answer 6

[David]

My proposal is #NextGenSeq

Answer 7

[Alastair Kerr]

Over the last few years my core facility has not dealt with that much data derived from Sanger sequencing. I guess that this is quite common trend. I tried looking for hashtags based on sanger sequencing without much luck.

So how about just #DNASeq?

However even that may not be all that useful in future. The problems I face with all the different applications of non-sanger sequencing (ChipSeq, MAPSeq, RNASeq, miRNASEQ, epigenetics, denovo assembly) and different technologies (HiSeq, PacBio ..) can be quite unique to each application or tech. Indeed some of our 'deep' sequencing projects are not all that deep (whether they should be is a different matter...).

Would an ontology or controlled vocabulary of tweet tags work? Perhaps too complicated but worth considering.

[Samuel Lampa]

Heh, yeah, quite many kinds of sequencing. "Sequencing" alone is not a good term either, since it appears in audio processing communities ... but what about #BioSeq then? :)

[Samuel Lampa]

If anybody else likes it (BioSeq), feel free to suggest. I don't like to answer my own questions (and it was not completely my idea anyway, was actually inspired by DNASeq suggestion).

[Samuel Lampa]

If anybody else likes it (BioSeq), feel free to add as a proper answer (Don't like to answer own question, and was not really my idea anyway, but inspired by "DNASeq")

[Peter]

But #DNASeq doesn't include RNA-Seq for transcriptomes etc.