During TechCrunch Disrupt today, tweetbeat announced they are finally ready to go live. Kosmix calls TweetBeat “the end of hashtags”. With their service, there would no longer be a need to take up valuable tweet space with those annoying #words. I know that they are used to help track events, people and places. You have to admit, though, that it’s frustrating enough trying to say what you need to say in less than 140 characters. It’s even more frustrating when you have to also fit in that almighty hashtag.

tweetbeat scans more than 90 million tweets every day in order to identify the hottest topics and trends. It only shows you the best tweets about those topics. This is done by figuring out who the influencers are for any given topic, such as when Gnomedex happened. tweetbeat scans each tweet for semantic data. They also look at signals such as how much a given tweet has been replied to or retweeted.

tweetbeat lets you follow the most interesting things in real-time. You’ll discover what is being said about any event right as it is happening. You can even push a virtual pause button, taking you back to a specific moment in time. There’s a little slider tool which lets you track down the exact second a topic burst into the limelight. If you connect your own Twitter account to the service, you can quickly retweet (or reply to) anything seen on the service.

For example, over the past few days there have been almost 64,000 tweets about Disrupt from over 11,000 people — but only a small percentage have used the “#tcdisrupt” tag. TweetBeat found the tweets anyway.

If this service works half as well as it appears, we may just be able to finally put an end to hashtags. I’m still playing around and testing it out. Keep an eye open in coming days for more information and insights.