Facebook today took the next step towards challenging Twitter by adding hashtag support to its mobile site and launching related hashtags. When you click or search for a hashtag, the results page will show other hashtags often posted at the same time.
Facebook brought Twitter’s hashtags to the masses earlier this month, turning #-preceded words into hyperlinks you can click on to see mentions by your friends, Pages, and people who post publicly. Users can also search for hashtags to bring up a stream of mentions.
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At the time there was no mobile support, and Facebook’s popular iOS and Android smartphone apps still don’t work with hashtags. But Facebook says its HTML5 mobile site m.facebook.com gets the hash hookup yesterday. That’s pretty important since publishing hashtagged posts about events your attending is a core use case. Now anyone with a mobile browser can pump some ### into Facebook.
Related hashtags, which are also present on Twitter, will make sure you don’t miss parallel conversations. Facebook analyzes which hashtags are frequently posted together to discover which are associated. After viewing the results for one, you can click down the row of related hashtags to get a wider perspective on whatever’s caught the world’s attention.
Facebook hashtags could unlock the real-time web for a whole wave of casual Internet surfers. Between Twitter’s pioneering work and Facebook’s new support, these conversations can finally include everyone like they’re supposed to.
Source: Tech Crunch
