It wasn't that late. At early as 2005, there was a form with the prompt "John Doe is:" and you had to squeeze whatever thoughts you needed your friends to know into that format.
First of all, mini-feed launched in Sep, 2006, according to a TechCrunch post from that time. That was the real time Facebook started to be anything near what it is today, and certainly well before status updates.
I first noticed people using status updates in March 2008, how do I know month and year, you ask? because there was serious shit going on on my life at the time. And I remember reading "X is blah blah blah" for the first time while I was going through my shit. It was new enough to notice. I'll conceed that the "status feature" may have existed a year before I really noticed it, so we are still at early 2007 two years earlier than 2005.
I also do recall the criticism of "you're copying Twitter" as a sibling posted.
I remember using the brand new Facebook chat about April or May 2008, FWIW.
edit: 2006, not 2016.