Tag, your it! – How to tag people in your facebook status
Facebook has long had the facility to tag photo’s of your friends and family, in fact it’s often cited as one of the main reasons people switched from MySpace to it. However until recently you haven’t been able to tag your friends in your status.
Now you can! Well maybe you can, it’s something that facebook have been rolling out over the last few week’s I believe however not everyone has the ability to tag their friends.
So why? Why would you want to tag them? Traditionally facebook’s status has been a fairly private thing, it tended to be just about what you where up to and what you did, that because it tended only to be a very few who read it. Then last year facebook had a big change, and when’t real time, allowing users to see and comment on their friends up-dates with ease, and with it the way we use facebook our status up-dates changed as well.
Just as the 2008 upgrade due in part to the explosion in use of a new social media tool, Twitter, so the ablity to tag status upgrade is lifted from the same tool. In twitter for throes who don’t know, you can tag your friends by prefixing their user name with an @ symbol (see below for how this looks in real life).
tag a person in facebook
Facebook have taken this and ran with it, with this upgrade you can not only tag people but also events, fan pages, events and applications.
tag a fan page in facebook
tag an application in facebook
These messages are then posted to your wall as well as throes of everyone you’ve taged.
It will be interesting to see if re-tweeting (or RT’ing), the twitter practice of re-posting an update while citing the original author gets a facebook equivalent (re-facing maybe :)
Let us know what you think about this twitter inspired taging, will you use it? Is it too much like twitter? Or do you think it’s a waste of time?