Facebook updates status features

Facebook will soon let users ‘tag’ friends mentioned in their status updates, in the same way they can tag friends in photos. The tag will create an in-text link to the friend’s page, and can also be used to link to brand and company pages as well as events, groups and applications.

The feature will be introduced in the next “several weeks” and will “increase users’ ability to reference real world connections on the social networking system”, project manager Andrew Huang says.

Users will be able to create the links by typing the ‘@’ symbol into the update box, which will bring up a drop down menu with a list of names the user can select from. Eventually, Facebook plans to extend the tagging feature to applications as well.

It will also be possible to pull up all the status updates mentioning a particular person or company, regardless of who has posted them.

The use of the ‘@’ symbol, which is synonymous with Twitter, has been widely seen as a move to encroach on Twitters’ branding strength.