Facebook’s @Mentions Feature Is Live – Is it good or bad ? : Akila's Blog

If you are a frequent reader of my blog, you would have noticed that I had a widget called “Posts I’m thinking of” (Still it’s there:) ) There I had mentioned something like “Next Facebook Feature”:) The feature I was dreaming of has become a reality.

via Mashable

Facebook just sent shockwaves through the social web with its announcement that they will be supporting @mentions in status updates. The feature, which Facebook calls tagging, allows you to not only reference friends, but groups, pages, and events.

Well as you might know that this is something copied from Twitter. And it will be a major threat for Twitter as well.

Without any hesitation we will say that this move is a direct attack on its upstart competitor Twitter , whose @mention feature (formerly known as @reply) has been an integral part of the microblogging service.

This is not the first time Facebook copied other sites especially Twitter. Facebook copied Twitter real-time search and FriendFeed’s ‘Like’ feature. ( Facebook acquired FriendFeed later )

I thought about this @Mention feature because of the difficulties I faced when using Facebook. For example if you are mentioning someone’s name in a status update there was no way that person could know about. If you are mentioning that person’s name in a comment it was the same. Further more you could not relate someone to a picture without tagging him/herself. This was something many people didn’t like.

Beside that when it comes to Facebook notes, only the author can tag people. A reader doesn’t have the opportunity to relate it to other people (But they could share). In my case I thought of using Facebook username anywhere with the ‘@’ sign whereas Facebook uses the user’s name and currently this feature is only available on ‘Facebook Wall’

Why Will This Be a Good Move ?

More interactivity among users.
This will a platform for larger conversations
This will attract Twitterholics in to Facebook (will it be;)?)
The users who could be attracted by Twitter will be attracted to Facebook.

Why Will This Be a Bad Move ?

Existing users might not like this feature
Too much conversations – SPAM ( Some say the new Facebook app makes photo spam
Existing users might leave Facebook as it’s getting too much annoying (will it be?)

Actually it is arguable how effective integrating Twitterlike features in to Facebook because Facebook is a more closed network whereas Twitter is more opened.

But Facebook has become a long way being just a typical social network. It has attracted most of the leading brands in to its umbrella. So who knows this might be a Twitter killing move.

Twitter watch out. Facebook is on a roll here!

Update:

Twitter users has the habit of using "RT @username when they re-post an update sent by another user. But on Facebook there was no such a habit. But with the @Mentions feature it's now time to bring that habit to Facebook as well.

Shall we call it RP (RePost) or use same old RT in honour of Twitter ?

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