Move over Twitter — Facebook wants in again.
Facebook has decided to incorporate hashtags into its website. The hashtag, identified by the “#” sign, was originally used by Twitter. Since Twitter started using hashtags, other social media sites, advertisers and news organizations have caught on. Advertisers are also using hashtags by encouraging people through commercials and other means to use specific hashtags in order to promote their products.
Hashtags are used as creative rights of expression by users to express ideas; they allow people to easily join a conversation simply by adding a hashtag to their post and then clicking on a hashtag to see all posts that contain the same hashtag.
The Wall Street Journal reported in a a story:
“Facebook is testing whether to follow Twitter’s lead and allow users to click on a hashtag to pull up all posts about similar topics or events so it can quickly index conversations around trending topics and build those conversations up, giving users more reason to stay logged in and see more ads. Instagram, which Facebook acquired last year, already uses hashtags, allowing users to sort photos by the symbol.”
Yahoo! News said that the attempt to bring hashtags to Facebook is “to improve its search and indexing capabilities.”
Facebook hasn’t commented yet on their plans to include hashtags.
Ironically, YouTube has a variety of different rants about people who have tried to use hashtags on Facebook in the past, such as this video:
But it looks like these hashtag police officers are going to have to get over their frustrations as Facebook works to become part of the #hashtag battle.
