Mark Zuckerberg Explains Facebook Newsfeed Features -Image from Wired Magazine Website

‘Wired Magazine’ talks about the upcoming Facebook Hashtag strategy as something to be ported directly from Twitter. We do agree that it is something not too creative, but Facebook is going to do what it sees as appropriate.

Technically, the whiz kids at Facebook are simply trying to help users share content easily through Hashtags. They first appeared on Twitter and since then, the entire world has been using them like crazy. I remember the time when the Hashtag culture was not only hot but something totally new.

At the moment, Facebook is simply testing the idea of Hashtag implementation. On their beta test beds, they are analyzing Hashtags as a method to help users follow strangers, make content viral and share things easily. But the real purpose of Hashtags goes beyond what Facebook is claiming at the moment.

Facebook Declines Hashtag Monetization – Wall Street Journal Inquires

When the Wall Street Journal reporters contacted Facebook concerning the Hashtag implementation, no one commented. The most that the company reps said that it was a new way of aiding users in sharing, connecting and making their content popular. Also, the fact that Facebook is still “considering” the Hashtag strategy, doesn’t exactly make it a newsworthy material – as said by the company respondents so far.

Granted that the social media company finally decides to go ahead with the hash mark, it would be an additional vector for letting ad execs earn more revenue. By now, the hash mark has become a beacon of content popularity. Twitter maintains the trending feeds through these tags. Once you click them, you are taken to a separate section where relevant tweets against these tags are actually “trending”.

Facebook simply has to apply the same thing over at its website. The Hashtag will be a natural point for advertising, because users will see relevant Ads all over the pages. The advertisers will be hypothetically promoting user posts, the same way they are already promoting their business pages for more “Likes”. As a matter of fact, ad companies won’t have to do much since users will be doing the “dirty” work on their own.

As a result, these posts will have an extended tenure at different Facebook newsfeed section. I’ll interpret them as “promoted posts” because of the way they’ll be staying fresh for a longer duration. The “non promoted” posts will be slightly de-ranked. For instance, even though Facebook is letting users pay for their Facebook page posts, as per the individual post rates, this method will probably be outdated after the Hashtag inquisition.

Wired Comments – What Others are Saying about Facebook Copying Twitter:

Over at the ‘Wired Magazine’ website, there were some interesting comments to read. The link to this article is here. I read some comments and therefore I’d love to talk about them at ‘The National.’

Simon Gray says: I think you’ll find Twitter didn’t invent the hashtag, but Twitter’s users started using them themselves, and then other Twitter search services – followed by Twitter itself – started making use of the folksonomy convention after seeing it catch on amongst the users.

The notion of the hashtag is an analogy of IRC channels, which emerged in the late 1980s / early 1990s, IRC itself coming to the fore during Gulf War One, as the way people on the ground got news out of the country in the way the mainstream media couldn’t. It wouldn’t surprise me if designating channels in IRC with the hash symbol was inspired by something earlier on.

So Facebook isn’t copying Twitter, it’s just coming late to a very old party that probably predates when Biz Stone was even born…

I’d have thought a Wired journalist would have known something of a basic history of the Internet and its cultures…

National Editor: I completely agree with what Simon says. Yes, Twitter did not exactly come up with the Hashtag culture. It was the users who initiated it and later on, Twitter developers simply seized the opportunity to create something better out of it. They added the “trending” culture and routed the hash marks to pages that were relevant to the tags.

FuckenGruven says: If Twitter decided to wage a real “war” against Facebook (and I desperately hope they do) Twitter would crush Facebook. However, Twitter presently isn’t even in the same market. “Social Media” is far too broad for any one company to cover all the bases and these two companies don’t share the same space. It’s silly to even consider the current issues a “war”.

So far Twitter hasn’t done anything to Facebook. Facebook, on the other hand, is mightily and rightfully fearful of Twitter and others and has done everything it can to keep Twitter out of the Facebook Graph while simultaneously trying to integrate all of Twitter’s key features. All this does is demonstrate a “me too!” non-innovation strategy on Facebook’s part and further relegate them to the soon-to-be-extinct roster. Twitter is probably just waiting for Facebook to finish its slow spiral down the drain.

Facebook’s entire business strategy is way off base. If their users are their product they need to do more to make happy-fun-time out of Facebook usage to attract more of them (which does not include broad video advertising) and find another way to charge businesses for access to those users. Simply charging a fee per message to allow business to contact users would be an excellent start. Killing user trust and annoying them further with ads is not.

National Editor: Oh yeah, that would be the day when we’ll see Twitter actually competing against Facebook. Even right now, Twitter has the upper hand due to several advantages. You can take the unlimited followers theory because it gives more exposure to tweets. Over at Facebook, within a user account, you can only have almost 5,000 friends.

Facebook fanpage does have the unlimited followers culture. However, you’d have to own a page or administer it to make things go viral. From the user account itself, it’s always the limited 5,000 boundary.

Note: Images are courtesy of Wired.Com.