Copying Twitter hashtags another way for Facebook to make money

Say what you will about Facebook, but the social network is not too proud to copy. Facebook is reportedly considering co-opting the hashtags that first emerged on Twitter, following its previous aping of the Twitter model of following strangers and sharing content publicly.

Facebook is testing the idea of supporting the use of hashtags in posts to the social network, according to reports in The Wall Street Journal and other publications. Facebook has declined to comment on the reports.

Hashtags, unique and often cryptic terms preceded by a hash mark ("#"), are specially tracked and aggregated on Twitter as they would presumably be on Facebook. Twitter shows which tags are trending, and clicking on a hashtag brings up other posts with the same tag.

Facebook is surely interested in the additional vector they provide for advertisers. On Twitter, advertisers can pay to promote their own hashtags alongside Twitter's list of most common hashtags.

The aggregation pages showing posts associated with a hashtag is another natural point for advertising. On Facebook, advertisers could hypothetically "promote" user posts that contain particular hashtags just as they now promote "likes" of their business pages. Such promoted posts could get more prominent and longer-lasting placement on Facebook's News Feed, where non-promoted items are sorted by relevance.

Facebook's apparent tinkering with hashtags is being framed in the tech press, all too predictably, as part of a war with Twitter. But the only battle that matters to Facebook in the end is the one for the attention of its own users for the dollars of its own advertisers. Hashtags will be a way to grow both.

Samsung Galaxy S4

Samsung's newest smartphone, the Galaxy S4 -- evolutinary or revolutionary? given the hype leading up to yesterday evening's product debut, that debate likely will rage for days, if not weeks.

But the news is a boon for shares of Apple as jittery investors finally saw reason to hit the "buy" button. In midafternoon trading, Apple's stock was up 2.5 percent -- and this on a day when the overall stock market has been trading in the red.

In the lead-up to the Galaxy S4 announcement, there had been no small amount of hand-wringing among the chattering class about whether Apple would ever recapture its mojo against a surging Samsung. But while the early reviews gave the new smartphone good marks, the tone was more respectful than breathless about what essentially is an incremental upgrade. So it was that Apple's shares were up out of the gate today as analyst reviews of the Samsung news began to filter in. Such as: "While the S4 is likely to be the iPhone's biggest competitor this year at the high end of the market, we remain confident in our iPhone estimate for this year of 177.5 million, which includes a cheaper phone in the September quarter," wrote Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray.

And this from Jefferies analyst Peter Misekwho said that he wanted to see the real-world uses for the new device and whether they actually got used:

"We believe the S4 will certainly sell well and it is incrementally negative for Apple," Misek said. "However, the device is not revolutionary, in our view."