Facebook starts the big hashtag rollout, with trending topics coming soon

Today, Facebook is finally getting aboard the hashtag bandwagon with the first phase of a planned global rollout.

Hashtags will help organize timely conversations around popular topics, such as current events and public personalities.

Starting today, you can search for hashtags from the Graph Search bar. Also, hashtags created on services like Twitter and Instagram are now clickable on Facebook.

A technology hailing back to the early days of IRC, a hashtag is a type of metadata meant to indicate a category or categories for the content being posted. On Facebook, hashtags can now connect people and posts with categories in common.

In a blog post on the news, Facebooker Greg Lindley writes that television shows and sporting events generate huge buzz on Facebook. And while the buzz receives heavy monitoring from media and analytics folks, there’s not much connecting the data for consumers.

“To date, there has not been a simple way to see the larger view of what’s happening or what people are talking about,” said Lindley, who continued to note that hashtags are just the first step in making timely topics and related conversations easier to find on the network.

“We’ll continue to roll out more features in the coming weeks and months, including trending hashtags and deeper insights, that help people discover more of the world’s conversations,” he concluded.