Facebook now has clickable hashtags

http://newsroom.fb.com/News/633/Public-Conversations-on-Facebook

by 6chars • 13 years ago

52 55 13 years ago

newsroom.fb.com

robk• 13 years ago

While it makes logical sense I can't help but be saddened by the further misuse of hash tagging by the clueless.

jgross206• 13 years ago

what's the proper use? I'm one of the clueless

zemo4• 13 years ago

hashtags allow the user to describe to the machine how to categorize a piece of text. So, for example, "I just stepped in shit. #winning" is a way for a user to have the sentence "I just stepped in shit" categorized in a specific way; not necessarily the way the machine would have chosen to categorize it. You're not supposed to just hashtag every word. Optimally, if another human clicks on one of your hashtags, they get to see some thematically related content. On some networks, though (Instagram in particular), hashtags are used to game the system; since there are discovery featured built around hashtags, merely including a popular hashtag can improve your visibility. So self-indulgent teens will hashtag their selfies with #food, because it's a primitive form of SEO gaming, and they wind up getting more likes. Or like with Go, people who code Go never actually call it "golang", but #golang is the canonical hashtag because it's more specific than #go, which is ... noise.

rmc8• 13 years ago

A linguistic change is happening in the English language. We're adding a new class of word, the "referent case", which is signified by a # before the word. The referent case shows the topic of a sentence, just like how the nominative case shows the actor of a verb, etc. We've already added the vocative case to English with the @ grammatical marking.

russellsprouts• 13 years ago

That's pretty interesting. I wonder how smileys fit into our grammar. I often wonder what our typical grammar will look like in 50-100 years or more. I'm sure something will survive.

rmc8• 13 years ago

Oh I forgot about smilies/emoticons, they are a new non-word symbol that we're adding to indicate the tone/mood of the 'speaker' of the sentence.

ypcx3• 13 years ago

and it will take another 20 years before we realize that in most cases we don't really need upper case letters. now burn me for heresy.

Zikes2• 13 years ago

Forgive the crudeness of the example, but there's a huge difference between the following two sentences:

I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse.

i had to help my uncle jack off a horse.

lcasela2• 13 years ago

i agree! i mean, what's really wrong with typing in all lowercase?

weinzierl2• 13 years ago

I agree, except that hashtages are used in other languages as well. I think they even work in every language.

rmc8• 13 years ago

Sure, it works for every language. Just like how lots of languages use ! to show an exclaimation on a sentance, or ? to indicate a question.

kmfrk• 13 years ago

Just be careful, if you're ever in France: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/mediamonkeyblog/2013/feb/06/.... :)

zemo4• 13 years ago

it's not English language that's changing, it's human language. Hashtags represent the implicit knowledge within human communication that there is a machine observer present. Hashtags are how humans help to guide machines to behave in the way that they expect.

ryanklee2• 13 years ago

Except people are now using them in both written and verbal communication when they know for a fact that there's no machine observer.

In other words, hashtags are now a functional part of grammar.

Sometimes it's for machine consumption. Sometimes it's for human consumption. Sometime's both.

As everywhere in language, context determines usage.

Edit: Here's an obligatory languagelog post on hashtags...

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3671

rmc8• 13 years ago

That's a bit dystopic, implying for the first time that humans are aware of their new machine masters. But all languages, incl. English, has changed. English no longer has nominative/dative grammatical case markers (instead relying on word position), this can make spell checkers easier (since there are less permutations of words), does that mean humans did it for our machine masters? No because it happened hundreds of years ago.

sneak• 13 years ago

No.

rmc8• 13 years ago

Latin had a vocative case which was formed by changing the ending. "Et tu, Brute?" could be translated into "And you, @Brutus?", not the usage of "?", "," and "@" as grammatical markers.

kriro3• 13 years ago

I just tried it with a post that included #nsa and it's not clickable. Not rolled out yet or am I too dumb?

jedanbik• 13 years ago

It doesn’t work for me, either. Maybe it takes time to propagate changes to every Facebook user? No clue.

onedev• 13 years ago

Slow rollout, FB-style.

vfl0• 13 years ago

They're really slow with rolling out new features it seems, as proven by the re-design of the news feed. Myself and others haven't received it yet.

kriro3• 13 years ago

Works now :)

geehsien• 13 years ago

#beautiful

danmaz743• 13 years ago

As someone who created a startup around a hashtags search engine (1), I'm very glad of this development from a business point of view - the more hashtags are used, the better.

As I already wrote (2), though, I'm not sure if this is a great move for Facebook in the long run. Facebook owns the incredibly compelling core expectation of "easily sharing with friends and family through the Internet". But, for obvious reasons, public posts and comments are preferable for advertising purposes, so Facebook is also trying to eat Twitter's pie.

Problem is, can you be both the place where people connect with their closest connections, and where public discourse goes on? My guess is that you can't, and if this move really succeeds - which is entirely possible - this could be the start of the end of FB's domination of the "privately sharing" space - which is less easily monetized, but much more compelling than the "publicly sharing" one.

(1) http://hashtagify.me

(2) http://danmaz74.me/2013/05/16/facebook-hashtags-when-monetiz...

EDIT: some corrections

bluetidepro• 13 years ago

"My guess is that you can't..."

Why would you guess that you can't be that place? Personally, it would make much more sense to have a place where I share all my stories and then choose whether it should be for the public or just personal (like how it's currently done with Facebook). That makes more sense to me than having two separate sites to share public vs personal, as long as there is still the aspect that personal DOES, indeed, stay personal.

danmaz743• 13 years ago

There are two problems. The first, most obvious one is that of clutter (not to say spam). The more public updates are in your feed, the less space there is for your personal - and more important - ones. Granted, there are solutions to this problem (groups), but how many people are even able to use them?

The second, more subtle - but more fundamental IMHO - one is that of Facebook's brand. If this succeeds, it will inevitably be diluted. In the long run, this could open the space to some competitor who focuses completely on the private space. This is difficult due to network effects, but not at all impossible.

phwd• 13 years ago

can you be both the place where people connect with their closest connections, and where public discourse goes on?

This remains to be seen. They have been working on it just in a really crash, burn and restart process way. Mark Zuckerberg once went through two options for public discourse

* create a Facebook fan page

* open his personal profile to public

The first attempt was silently killed (from what I can see, this is my assumption) and now redirects to his personal page (www.facebook.com/markzuckerberg -> www.facebook.com/zuck). The second attempt, well, as you can see from his profile, it is pretty much closed up now.

Private sharing, as least from the friends I have, has been going on pretty frequently, just not on the timeline

* private groups

* group messages

With messages, it seems Facebook is testing inline message (1) along the status composer (on the homepage) which aligns with the thinking that they are making private sharing less restrictive to action on while maintaining "privacy" (in quotes, as some may not agree to the level of privacy offered)

I have no data to back up how effective private sharing is though.

(1) http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/02/facebook-status-composer-me...

danmaz743• 13 years ago

Good points, but how many people really use private groups? Aren't your friends more technically able than most people?

Personally, I connected to a lot of people of facebook for political discussions, and in the end that detracted a lot from the effectiveness of FB as a mean to stay connected with my family and closer friends...

6chars• 13 years ago

pg, when will HN be getting hashtags? This is an essential feature!

krapp• 13 years ago

just start using them now so when pg implements them the content will already be ready.

#hashtagallthethings #earlyadopter

kriro3• 13 years ago

More #innovator than #earlyadopter

#xingchasmunderrated

nicwolff• 13 years ago

Soon, but each hashtag on a page will only work until its continuation gets garbage collected.

ghrev• 13 years ago

#slowclap

allanberger• 13 years ago

http://newsroom.fb.com/News/633/Public-Conversations-on-Face...

medell• 13 years ago

Or clickable mot-dièses in France. Le sigh.

http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/01/30/france-bids-adieu-to-the...

Yhippa2• 13 years ago

I actually find friends who actually speak hashtags as a joke nowadays. I wonder if this will be a permanent thing say 20 years from now?

Facebook now has clickable hashtags

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