#OhGoody: Facebook Introduces Hashtags

There’s no #stopping hashtags. Facebook is confirming it will officially support the maddeningly ubiquitous categorization tool starting today, allowing users to #hashtag posts and making those hashtags #clickable.

Clicking a hashtag will bring up a list of posts from friends and pages you follow that contain the tag. This apes how the hashtag works on other social networks, including Pinterest, Facebook’s Instagram, and Twitter, where satan users invented the semantic device on their own.

Facebook believes its significantly broader and more mainstream users are ready to adopt the geeky convention. For example, the Oscars drove more than 66 million Facebook likes, comments, and posts.

“People were already using hashtags on Facebook — we just made them clickable,” a spokesperson says.

Initial suppot for hashtags is limited to basic search; you cannot combine hashtags with other Graph Search options. There is also no #advertising support for hashtags yet, though it will be a natural and potentially lucrative product to sell ads against, as we noted when rumors of Facebook hashtags first surfaced in March.