Facebook Hashtags Go Live, Gives A Shout-Out To Twitter

Twitter is the pioneer of the hashtag, but since then, many other online services have been adopting the number sign as well, because why not? Twitter's biggest competitor, however, just now added support for hashtags. That's right, Facebook now lets you click on hashtags that your friends have long been posting to their status updates.

Starting today, Facebook users will be able to click on hashtags, as well as search for them using the social network's new Graph Search feature. Clicking or searching a hashtag will reveal a feed of status updates, posts, images, and shared links dealing with a particular topic. As long as a user puts a certain hashtag in their post, it'll show up in the search for that hashtag.

Of course, though, not everything will show up in these feeds, since privacy settings will override what appears. For instance, Facebook users that don't allow the public to see their posts will not have their hashtagged posts show up in search results. The posts will only be visible to friends, or whoever the user has authorized to view their posts.

This is actually just the beginning for Facebook as far as hashtags are concerned. The company said that "hashtags are just the first step to help people more easily discover what others are saying about a specific topic and participate in public conversations." The social network will be continuing to roll out more features "in the coming weeks and months, including trending hashtags and deeper insights, that help people discover more of the world's conversations."

We first heard about the possibility of Facebook adding hashtags back in March, and it certainly made sense, so we're not too surprised that it's finally happening. In the grand scheme of things, it should make it more streamlined for users who have their social media accounts merged together so posting on Twitter will post the same thing automatically on Facebook, with hashtags now being clickable.

SOURCE: Facebook