Your nonsensical hashtagged status updates on Facebook will now, at last, have some meaning. The social network Facebook said hashtags will now be clickable and searchable, like they are on Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and, well, basically every other social network.
“Hashtags will be clickable on Facebook. When you click on a hashtag in Facebook, you’ll see a feed of what other people and pages are saying about that event or topic,” the company said in a statement.
You can search for a hashtag in the search bar if you want to participate in a larger conversation—like when “Game of Thrones” is airing or a political scandal erupts. When you search for a hashtag, like #GoT, you can write a post directly in the feed that pops up in that search. The feed will showcase results from both people and pages.
Facebook’s basic privacy policy applies to hashtagged status updates—if you have your posts set to friends-only, then only your friends will be able to see your updates, even with hashtags.
If you are in the mood for some micro-inspirations, here’s one. Twitter no longer asks you to tweet “What are you doing?” (it has switched to “What’s happening?” for quite some time now) and when Facebook went for a redesign in August 2008 it added prominence to its status update feature and began asking users, “What are you doing right now?”. Note the similarity?
It’s not that Twitter didn’t seek inspiration elsewhere. It did and continues to do. So does Google+. The problem with this feature aping is that the competing social networks are slowly becoming clones of one another, feature by feature. Soon there might be little to tell them apart from their brand names.
