Facebook adds Twitter-style hashtags for topics

SAN FRANCISCO, USA – Facebook on Wednesday, June 12, added Twitter-style hashtags to help the more than one billion members of the social network tune into topics of interest at the leading social network.

“To date, there has not been a simple way to see the larger view of what’s happening or what people are talking about,” Facebook product manager Greg Lindley said in a blog post.

“Similar to other services like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest, hashtags on Facebook allow you to add context to a post or indicate that it is part of a larger discussion.”

Twitter made the ‘#’ symbol part of Internet Age culture by letting users of the globally popular one-to-many text messaging service label comments with terse topic descriptions marked with the punctuation mark.

Facebook users can search the service based on hashtags or click on a hashtag to get a list of posts people have put in the category, according to Lindley.

“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,” Lindley said.

“We’ll continue to roll out more features in the coming weeks and months.”

In May, Facebook also began authenticating the pages of famous folks and big brands, a move that follows in Twitter’s footsteps. – Rappler.com