Live data from Hacker News

Facebook now has clickable hashtags

newsroom.fb.com

1–10 of 59 posts

Re: Facebook now has clickable hashtags

#3
A linguistic change is happening in the English language. We're adding a new class of word, the "referent case", which is signified by a # before the word. The referent case shows the topic of a sentence, just like how the nominative case shows the actor of a verb, etc. We've already added the vocative case to English with the @ grammatical marking.

Re: Facebook now has clickable hashtags

#6
post #3

A linguistic change is happening in the English language. We're adding a new class of word, the "referent case", which is signified by a # before the word. The referent case shows the topic of a sentence, just like how the nominative case shows the actor of a verb, etc. We've already added the vocative case to English with the @ grammatical marking.

That's pretty interesting. I wonder how smileys fit into our grammar. I often wonder what our typical grammar will look like in 50-100 years or more. I'm sure something will survive.

Re: Facebook now has clickable hashtags

#7
post #3

A linguistic change is happening in the English language. We're adding a new class of word, the "referent case", which is signified by a # before the word. The referent case shows the topic of a sentence, just like how the nominative case shows the actor of a verb, etc. We've already added the vocative case to English with the @ grammatical marking.

and it will take another 20 years before we realize that in most cases we don't really need upper case letters. now burn me for heresy.

Re: Facebook now has clickable hashtags

#9
As someone who created a startup around a hashtags search engine (1), I'm very glad of this development from a business point of view - the more hashtags are used, the better.

As I already wrote (2), though, I'm not sure if this is a great move for Facebook in the long run. Facebook owns the incredibly compelling core expectation of "easily sharing with friends and family through the Internet". But, for obvious reasons, public posts and comments are preferable for advertising purposes, so Facebook is also trying to eat Twitter's pie.

Problem is, can you be both the place where people connect with their closest connections, and where public discourse goes on? My guess is that you can't, and if this move really succeeds - which is entirely possible - this could be the start of the end of FB's domination of the "privately sharing" space - which is less easily monetized, but much more compelling than the "publicly sharing" one.

(1) http://hashtagify.me

(2) http://danmaz74.me/2013/05/16/facebook-hashtags-when-monetiz...

EDIT: some corrections

Re: Facebook now has clickable hashtags

#10
post #7
post #3

A linguistic change is happening in the English language. We're adding a new class of word, the "referent case", which is signified by a # before the word. The referent case shows the topic of a sentence, just like how the nominative case shows the actor of a verb, etc. We've already added the vocative case to English with the @ grammatical marking.

and it will take another 20 years before we realize that in most cases we don't really need upper case letters. now burn me for heresy.

Forgive the crudeness of the example, but there's a huge difference between the following two sentences:

I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse.

i had to help my uncle jack off a horse.

Post reply on HN