Facebook to finally add hashtags, says WSJ
Catching up to Twitter and other rivals, the company will incorporate hashtags into its network, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Facebook is finally jumping on the hashtag bandwagon, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal today.
Unnamed sources told the Journal that Facebook is working on adding the hashtag feature into the network, but it won't roll out anytime soon. A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment, saying, "We do not comment on rumor or speculation."
Popularized on Twitter, the hashtag has become synonymous with social media. Google+ and even Instagram, the photo-sharing service Facebook acquired last year, have the hashtag function on their networks.
Hashtags, words marked by a pound sign, are used to organize posts by topics or events, or to express how users are feeling at the moment. Users add hashtags to their posts and then can click on them to bring up all the posts labeled with the specific tag.
Hashtags are useful shortcuts, but all the companies that use them also make their networks searchable by keywords. Facebook is clearly trying to up its game in search with the introduction of Graph Search, so it wouldn't be surprising if the social network finally added hashtags to better organize content.
Just today, the company said it was going to start indexing its posts and comments to make them searchable on Graph Search.