Now, Facebook will have hashtags too

The latest of Mark Zuckerberg's "innovations", hashtags, synonymous with micro-blogging site Twitter, is now being incorporated on his social networking site Facebook.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Facebook is working on incorporating the hashtag, one of Twitter's most iconic markers, into its service by using the symbol as a way to group conversations.

What's a hashtag?
Hashtag is anything that follows # and is mostly used to categorise tweets by way of topic, enabling Twitter users to find everything that anyone anywhere has tweeted about any given subject.

They first appeared in online chat rooms before the micro-blogging site even existed, and have since then made their way on to several other major social networking sites, including Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr and Google+. They also tend to pop up on adverts and in TV shows.

When are the hastags coming to Facebook?
According to the report in WSJ, it is unclear how far along Facebook's work on the hashtag is and the feature isn't likely to be introduced imminently.

Lets create a hashtag!
1. Make sure it's new, fresh and relevant. Go to Search.twitter.com and find out if the hashtag already exists or not.

2. Hashtag's most important rule is that it has to be one word. So no space between words is a mandate. If you want to create a hashtag about mid-life crisis, it should be #midlifecrisis and not #mid life crisis.

3. Refrain from sensitive issues and statements that people feel emotionally about. It could backfire on you, badly.

4. Here’s Twitter‘s official statement on hashtag abuse.

“The following behaviors and others like them could cause your account to be filtered from search, or even suspended:

a. Adding one or more topic/hashtag to an unrelated tweet in an attempt to gain attention in search.
b. Repeatedly tweeting the same topic/hashtag without adding value to the conversation in an attempt to get the topic trending/trending higher.
c. Tweeting about each trending topic in turn in order to drive traffic to your profile, especially when mixed with advertising.
d. Listing the trending topics in combination with a request to be followed.
e. Tweeting about a trending topic and posting a misleading link to something unrelated.”