Borrowing from its rival should help keep Facebook relevant.The trend of major social networks borrowing key features off each other is nothing new: the Facebook ticker that sits alongside the news feed is very Twitter-like, while Twitter has introduced Instagram-style filters into the photo capabilities of its mobile apps. Facebook's adoption of Twitter's hashtag feature may ruffle a few feathers, but (like Google+) Facebook had to adopt it eventually or risk being left behind.
The appeal of the hashtag lies in its simplicity -- it's really just an extension of the search capabilities already built into Facebook and Twitter, but it makes them far more immediate and easy to use. You can already search public posts on Facebook for certain words, and as the super-fast Graph Search
continues its roll out, rooting through updates to find common themes will be more straightforward than ever. The hashtag is just a natural extension of what Facebook is already doing to make it easier to drill down into the content it's collecting.
The fact that most posts on Facebook are private (limited to your confirmed friends) while most updates on Twitter are public (viewable by anyone who happens across your profile) is likely to make hashtags far less effective on Facebook, but it will help to make the site more dynamic and organic, something it desperately needs as it battles user apathy. So much of Facebook feels linear and slow when compared to Twitter, and the hashtag is a small way in which it can stay relevant in the future.
Adapted from Yahoo News.
2 comments:
As simple as hashtags are, it doesn't really fit in Facebook. From my experience, people are hashtagging all of their status and boy is that ever weird.
Not just people, but companies as well. Its quite annoying really, hopefully they are not paying big bucks to some social media management services because they are getting robbed.
I think it would not chage a lot the stylistic of Twitter. Facebook creator is a clever guy. Have you herd he likes kenyan food? It is written here https://tuko.co.ke/186517-what-facebook-boss-mark-zuckerberg-said-about-mama-oliechs-fish.html Mark Zuckerberg, surprised a lot of people when he agreed to eat at one of the local joints in Nairobi!
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