I think it has transitioned from band-aid to design feature (when Twitter officially started using it) and then it transitioned once more. In the last transition, it has become more like an emoticon and can be used where hashtags don't make technical sense but do convey something extra. For example, I was having a Gmail chat with someone the other day and they said "I just ordered six boxes of Girl Scout Cookies. #fatty"
Unsurprising. I find a lot of people already use them, often cross-posting from Twitter, so they might as well make them less annoying by having them do something.
Alternatively, this could be a sign of an identity crisis at Facebook. Google+ and Twitter use them to group conversations logically, whereas Facebook groups things by people. Unless they switch back to everything being public by default, what's the point?
As a frequent Google+ and infrequent Twitter user, I was surprised to discover a few days ago that Facebook had no such thing as browsing popular posts, trending topics, hashtags, or anything that would connect people without being a friend of a friend yet. I thought it really sucked, so I guess this became about time.
Now they only have to get rid of showing my friends the posts that I liked from others. I'm not sure how the settings work, but it really feels like a big privacy intrusion. That's probably why Facebook thinks it's a feature though.
If Facebook is going to integrate hashtags into its working, I also hope they'll make it easy to collect information about them through APIs. I'd like to get data from Facebook for hashtagify.me
For outside services that try to parse and group content, if they implement searching via the API well it could be very useful. Related content is the thing that this would be quite useful for.
Wouldn't some level of support fall out of their graph search, by default?
I couldn't bring myself to more than skim the WSJ article, and I haven't used FB's graph search. But if you can search for "people I can reach/see" union "word" [where word can be e.g. #foo], it seems to me the userbase is already partways towards support, before FB does anything further.
I guess this leaves me wondering whether or not graph search already indexes "#foo", or whether it doesn't yet understand #foo as an targeted entity construct.
If #foo is already understood and indexed, then is this initiative then a matter of providing optimized aggregator UI's and/or API's?
The problem with the graph search: it is still limited to your connections and their's; you can't reach beyond your following with hashtags, as we can with Twitter, G+ - and over 50 social networks and sites with topic hashtags that are searchable.
