Facebook recently launched the concept of @mentions for status updates. This allows you to easily put links and references to other friends, fan pages and events in your status update. This feature is very similar to Twitter’s @ reference, to use it during a status update just hit the @ key anywhere in your status update box.

This will then give you a Facebook style select box where you can select what you are referring to. After you select that item it will be replaced in your status update box as a link.

Many months back Facebook offered to buy Twitter and Twitter. Since then we have seen Facebook start to roll out many Twitter like features including the status updates as the key feature after logging in, allowing users to create ‘vanity names’ rather than their email address being their unique identifier, and now the concept of @mentions.

I can’t see any Twitter users hanging it up to strictly use Facebook, but I can see that some Facebook users would be perfectly satisfied with these features to not start using Twitter.

Ryan Doom

How to link to friends in a Facebook status update