Hashtags on Facebook

Recently, I have noticed a trend of people ending their status updates with hashtags and I can't help but feel a little sorry for them. More on that later though, first, lets address exactly what a hashtag is.

The hashtag, is simply  a hash symbol (#) followed by a word or phrase combined without spaces or, in some cases, separated by full stops (e.g. #yolo, #iamswaggy, #hashtagging.is.hip). Hashtags were initially used in Internet Relay Chat as a way to categorize phrases for ease of use later when searching for that particular phrase.

The hashtag made its way to Twitter as a simple hack to group together posts under one phrase or topic until company heads noticed it catching on and wrote a nifty little software script that would recognize any time someone tweeted a phrase starting with a “#” and turn it into a link that would direct whoever clicked on it to  every other post out there containing that same hashtag. Suddenly, if you were #havingagreattime, you could click on your own hashtag link to see who else in the world was also #havingagreattime.

At its most basic level, a hashtag is simply a search- a label for a topic or a filter for a discussion.

Twitter isn’t the only site that uses hashtags though, additionally, hashtags are functional on YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Google+ as well as few other lesser known social websites.

You know who doesn’t use hashtags? Facebook.

And that is exactly where my sympathy for the poor souls hashtagging on Facebook lies. The poor folks who don’t understand what they are doing or why they are doing it. The poor kids that think it looks cool to fail at technology. It’s like watching your parents type “h-t-t-p-:-/-/-w-w-w-.” before every url. Watching the technologically challenged try to post status updates from their email. Listening to hipsters complain why they can’t have a profile song on their instagram account.

Basically, it represents a failure to understand technology- which wouldn’t be so bad if it was kept private, but the fact that these people are broadcasting their ignorance to everyone online….

...Well, that makes me sad.