Twitter has managed to make a name for itself in the social media game thanks to its original use of the hashtag. Now it appears that Facebook is trying to take away the thing that makes Twitter (News - Alert), Twitter by launching its own hashtag service, a service it had been quietly testing behind the scenes. Facebook has made no secret of the fact that the new inclusions of hashtags are a way to directly take on Twitter in real time conversations.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Facebook (News - Alert) feels that as of launch, “words in posts that are marked by ‘#’ will be grouped together. Users can track conversations by searching for these hashtags, or clicking on a hashtag in a post. That action will pull up a list of posts the include the hashtag, with most relevant posts first, such as those by your friends, followed by most recent, publicly available posts.”

While the two social networking sites have been largely engaged in friendly rivalry, that rivalry is starting to take on a look of the one between Apple and Microsoft or Google (News - Alert). Advertisers are starting to see the real potential of social marketing and when money is involved, even social media becomes a dog-eat-dog world. Hashtags are driving conversations about sports, relationships and business.

The one big problem with Facebook’s launch of these hashtags is that hashtags have lost some of their usefulness over the last few years. While it is still the easiest way to check in a conversation, it can also lead users to a weird stream of conversations from the millions of users on Twitter. Facebook should be working in the next few months to make hashtag searching on their site a much cleaner interface. If it can bring back the usefulness of the symbol, it could knock Twitter off its game for good.