Facebook may finally be giving in. Hashtags may be coming to the social network.
Although no official word has come out of the Mountain View-based company yet, everyone from the Wall Street Journal to TechCrunch has reported on the news.
"We do not comment on rumor or speculation," is the official response from Facebook's PR department.
CNET reports that the feature won't be coming any time soon, but states that an eventual rollout is likely, especially following Facebook's acquisition of Instagram last year, which already uses the hashtag function.
It will be interesting to see how hashtags will work alongside Graph Search. Currently, the internal Facebook search engine returns only people, apps, Pages, places, media and interests. Mark Zuckerberg has previously alluded to Facebook indexing posts and comments in the future, and hashtags seem like a fairly intuitive way to accomplish this.
Sponsored search results would also be an obvious, and in Zuckerberg's words, "natural way" to monetize Graph Search. Twitter already allows advertisers to pay for their hashtag to trend above what would be normal, and Facebook seems to be gearing up for a similar revenue model. Theoretically, advertisers could promote their products much as users currently "like" posts.
Facebook is not historically wont to copy features from other products or websites, but many in the tech press are already talking about the company's foray into hashtags like it's another salvo in the war against Twitter. This isn't the correct narrative. It's easy to look at Twitter's Interest Graph, then point to Facebook's Graph Search and talk about the parallels. The truth however, is that the two features are different enough to operate without cannibalizing each other, and that's likely to be the way the dynamic plays out in the coming months.
