The Social

Here's a visual of how status tagging works on Facebook.

(Credit: Facebook)

Facebook on Thursday announced that members can now link to other members' profiles in their status messages by using the @ symbol. The move is clearly inspired by the popularity of Twitter's "@-replies."

This new feature basically means that you can link to the profiles of your friends and other pages on Facebook, and that your friends will be informed when they've been tagged. It's currently rolling out to members' profiles.

Engineer Tom Occhino explains it in a post on the Facebook blog:

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend's name to something you are posting, just include the "@" symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications, and (fan) pages.

The feature will soon expand to third-party services that let you update your Facebook status, presumably including status message aggregators such as TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop.

The development prompted some of my industry competitors to use the word "BREAKING" in their headlines (Really? Can we please leave this term for things on the level of earthquakes, election results, and stampedes at Jonas Brothers concerts?) because it's yet another big sign that Facebook is gradually but aggressively encroaching upon Twitter's territory in its attempt to own the Web's trove of real-time conversation. Twitter is nowhere near the size of Facebook, nor is it anywhere near as feature-rich, but it's enough of a disruption in the space to make Facebook keep trying to get the upper hand.

As you may recall, this back-and-forth has included Facebook's failed attempt to buy Twitter, the "real-time stream" upgrades to the social network's home page, and its acquisition of FriendFeed, a streaming feed aggregator.

On an unrelated note, for brands using Facebook's fan pages, this could result in an interesting analytics product. The company hasn't yet said whether or how the managers of fan pages will be notified that they have been tagged--for a brand with a lot of fans, this could be a lot--and you might imagine that some of the demographics regarding who's talking about them and how often could be packaged into a nice marketing tool.

It'd also be a formidable rival to the "analytics dashboard" that Twitter plans to start selling to businesses later this year, which would be the San Francisco-based company's first concrete revenue model.

When Facebook launched its latest redesign, it became evident that the company was putting a lot of emphasis on real-time information--inspired, undoubtedly, by the runaway success of Twitter. Now the company's rolled out two small but crucial new features that put instant updates even more front and center.

First, Facebook is aiming to use the "publisher" tool--formerly known as the status update box--as members' gateway to the Web at large. Starting Wednesday and rolling out gradually, according to a post on the company blog, a beta version of the new content-sharing box will allow members to select exactly how public or private to make each piece of content that they share. The post by Facebook engineer Ola Okelola explained that something shared on a profile can be visible by friends, friends of friends, friends and networks (school, region, or company), user-created custom friends groups--or everyone on the Web.

Facebook's probably hoping that this will spur people to share more content: if members know that sharing a video, a photo, or even a status message won't by default go out to everyone who can see their profile, they might be more likely to share things along the lines of party photos and videos of their kids.

But, wait. There's more.

In addition, a post on the Facebook developer blog Wednesday explained that developers can now take advantage of live-streaming status update boxes much like the one that CNN used during President Obama's inauguration this January. "With the Live Stream Box on your website, users log in using Facebook Connect and share updates that appear both within the Live Stream Box and on their Facebook profiles and in their friends' home page Streams," the post by Tom Whitnah explained. "Each post includes a link back to the Live Stream Box on your site so users can discover the live event and immediately join based on their friends' recommendations."

It's intended so that people watching an event simultaneously can comment in sync on Facebook. And it's also supposed to be a no-brainer to create your own, meaning that Facebook is hoping a lot of developers and site owners will jump on this bandwagon.

"The Live Stream Box is easy to install and takes just a minute to set up," the post added. "To get the Live Stream Box on your website, get a Facebook API key, upload a small file to your website, and then embed a few lines of code into your Web page."

This is a move clearly aiming in the direction of Twitter, where real-time updates and discussions around events have become so commonplace that members regularly agree on a "hashtag" to flag related posts in advance of the event. (For the inauguration, for example, it was #inaug09.) The question is whether Twitter use has already become the standard for chronicling and commenting on events in real time--will enough people be willing to use Facebook widgets rather than apps built on Twitter?

When is a Twitter user not a Twitter user? Well, according to a new study from Pew Internet, "Twitter user" is a broad definition.

The research firm released a study this week in which the results indicated that in December, "11% of online American adults said they used a service like Twitter or another service that allowed them to share updates about themselves or to see the updates of others." Wow! Twitter sure is catching on!

But then you read the fine print: The catch here is that "update your status" is also a feature of big social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and those features are counted in Pew's definition of status-updating services. Considering Facebook and MySpace both have well over 100 million members apiece, the what-are-you-doing features on those social networks eclipse actual Twitter user for sure. We adore social-network statistics like nobody's business, but these ones probably have much less to say about Twitter than meets the eye.

So, um, taking that into consideration, let's check out the numbers.

About 20 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 34 have used a status-updating service, the research found (considering Facebook's ubiquity, this actually is lower than I would have expected). Then it starts to drop off. Only 10 percent of those between 35 and 44 answered affirmatively, 5 percent of those between 45 and 54, 4 percent between 55 and 64, and only 2 percent of those over 65. Okay, not surprising.

There were a few tidbits about individual social-networking sites. The average Twitter user, the study found, is older than a Facebook or MySpace user: 31, compared to 27 for MySpace and 26 for Facebook. (The average user of professional networking site LinkedIn is 40, according to the same Pew data.) Well, that's kind of interesting.

Then, the survey goes on to talk about access. 76 percent of Twitter users (and Facebook status-updaters, and MySpace status-updaters, and users of other microblogging services that haven't yet shuttered due to recessionary constraints) use wireless Internet, whether it be Wi-Fi or a handheld device. That's in contrast to 59 percent of U.S. Internet users as a whole, indicating (unsurprisingly) that people who run around updating Facebook statuses or Twitter feeds are a more mobile, tech-savvy set.

Also, 82 percent of them own cell phones and use them to send text messages (compared to 61 percent of U.S. adult Web users as a whole), but there are no statistics as to whether they use text messaging to update their statuses. However, 40 percent of that 82 percent uses the mobile Web. They're not any more likely to read the news than the average Web user, but they're more likely to read it in a mobile form and are less likely (52 percent compared to 65 percent) to read print newspapers. Guess this whole Internet thing is catching on.

One more for you and then we'll let these mildly convoluted figures rest. "Twitter users" (in Pew's broad definition) are way more likely to have blogs of their own. 29 percent of them, compared to 11 percent of the general Web population, say they have ever started a blog. Guess if you overshare in one way, you'll do it in another!