Using the Twitter adopted ‘@’ in your Facebook status update now allows you to tag people, groups, profiles. There’s no limit to the number of people you can tag within a Status and when you do so, it appears in their feeds too. Yet another way to have direct conversations with your friends. Is it a Twitter killer? Nah. Will it clog up our Walls? Definitely. There’s currently no setting that can control whether these appear in your feed. Get prepared to see lots of half conversations.
One possible solution is to head over to Facebook’s Prototype Applications and install Recent Comments Filter, this presents a new Wall View only showing updates that your friends thought interesting enough to comment on.
Of course it’s not all bad news. You can comment on a Status update and these are nicely nested underneath – something I’d personally wished for on Twitter for some time. Facebook are great at presenting ways for us to talk with and share with our friends.
Currently Facebook do not provide the gateway to export this new form of conversation so this will not be backed up in the forthcoming update to SocialSafe. This new update will back up your Status Updates and your friends comments on those. We’ll be watching this closely and will increase this functionality as soon as we can.