Why Facebook is stealing the #hashtag from Twitter

Let's not forget the most important thing here, which is that aside from current events and strict organization, hashtags are the symbolic vernacular of idiots across the world, who spray them across sentences like a bottle of Cheez Whiz. It is one of the worst, toxic forms of internet pollution. But what can one do? People love hashtags... and Facebook, if nothing else, is about giving the people what they want. [Gizmodo]

Where you see hashtags, Facebook sees dollar signs. Like so many recent Facebook experiments and site changes, the hashtag idea sounds clunky when you think about it from the user's perspective, but rather ingenious when you consider it from a business perspective.... Hashtags — like Graph Search, emoji, its latest Timeline redesign, and just about everything else Facebook does — are yet another a way to get users to tell Facebook more about what they like, what they're doing, what they're interested in, and what they're searching for at any given moment.... The move isn't about showing users more ads. It's about showing them more-effective ads. [Slate]

One of Twitter's largest issues has been its difficulty translating just how normal people are supposed to use the hashtag in the first place. When on-boarding new users, they're faced with a litany of "at symbols" and hashtags, a language of Twitter's own that isn't immediately clear.... So Facebook's widespread adoption of this language could actually bring the lexicon to the masses, essentially introducing a billion newbies to a gnarly language — one which Twitter is still trying to figure out how to introduce to users. Remember, Twitter: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. [All Things D]

That's a good thing. The hashtag isn't a technology or even a platform service like the Facebook Poke. It's more of an organizing principle, a way of opting into a larger public discussion.... In that way, it's like another keyboard orphan, the @ symbol, plugged into the email protocol 40 years ago and still going strong. Along the way, the @ has outlived hundreds of email companies, not to mention a fair number of computer companies and operating systems. The hashtag seems on track to live just as long, and outlive just as many platforms. Even if Twitter collapses, there'll still be a place to say #RIP. [The Verge]