There was a time when Facebook and Twitter were two separate entities in social media world. Facebook, the personal space to share with friend and family while Twitter was the domain for real-time ‘news’ and discussion along with the opportunity to follow celebrities. As the world rely more and more on mobile devices for internet access, the two social media giants starts rubbing shoulders with each other to get bigger piece of mobile advertisement pie.

The #rumour has it:

According to WSJ, Facebook is now working on a hashtag feature similar to Twitter. People who do not know, hashtag is sort of highlighter in tweets where you can put emphasis on a particular word by placing a ‘#’ before it. This also allows users to use it as a tag to search in real-time for all the tweets containing this hashtag. You can think of these hashtags as a ‘keyword search’.

Google Plus has also incorporated the hashtag feature even since its beginning. Facebook has been avoiding it for long. But the introduction of Graph Search has shown that Facebook has few arrows (even if borrowed from somewhere else)  in its quiver. Facebook has announced that it will start including statuses and posts as well in the Graph Search. Keeping that in mind, it is quite viable that Facebook will start including hashtags for keyword specific Graph Search.

What’s the fuss?

It’s all about moolah. By means of hashtags, Twitter provides a real good way to see the tweets in real-time and thus gets advertisers more focused on advertising on current/real-time moments. Also, as hashtags emphasize on certain keywords, it will help in a more accurate targeting for advertising.

Facebook has been copying Twitter features for a long time

It;s not the first time that Facebook has copied something from Twitter. Facebook started copying Twitter’s feature around two years back when it introduced the feature of “subscribe” on the line of ‘follow’ of Twitter. Later  Gradually it also introduced the feature of tagging anyone (person or page) in comments and status by using ‘@’ before the name. Twitter users know very well the use of ‘@’ to ‘mention’ (read, tag) anyone in a tweet.

I have felt the need of hashtags for a long time. The news of Facebook hashtags is a welcome sign. Though it won’t be coming any time soon, it still is a positive change. By the way that makes me thinking if hashtags were first used by Apple instead of Twitter, how many lawsuits would have we seen?