

Facebook Working on Incorporating the Hashtag - chermanowicz
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887323393304578360651345373308-lMyQjAxMTAzMDEwNDExNDQyWj.html

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joonix
It's kind of a testament to the silly times we're in that this kind of thing
is covered by the Wall Street Journal.

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dclusin
Or that what was created to be a bandaid over a design failure (was hashtag on
purpose or not?) is now being considered a feature.

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27182818284
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"

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mcintyre1994
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?

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themckman
I literally thought they were trying to INCORPORATE the hashtag. They're
really working on implementing it.

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lucb1e
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.

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danmaz74
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

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mickdarling
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.

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vacipr
Let's hope they don't make another waiting list for this.

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acoyfellow
Next step: roll out ways to monetize hashtag for brands (marketing tools?)

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flexxaeon
Been expecting this ever since hearing the 'rumor'.

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apl002
first poke, now this...#comeonfacebook

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pasbesoin
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?

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osakasaul
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.

