Facebook adds @mentions to status updates. | Hacker News Reader

Facebook adds @mentions to status updates.

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52 pointsmgcreed28 comments

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Facebook kills Twitter, and now RSS can rest in peace, knowing that its murder has been avenged.

http://www.techcrunchit.com/2009/05/05/rest-in-peace-rss/

</sarcasm>

But Twitter is for public verbal diarrhea , FB is for shouting amongst your friends / acquaintances.

You can mark your account as private on Twitter, if you like.

But you can't do the opposite... I believe this is the point the GP was making.

Sure you can. Set status permission to "Everyone". Facebook introduced the feature here:

http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=98499677130

But on Twitter, that seems like a step towards outright account deletion.

None of my twitter contacts are on my FB.

Facebook allows public verbal diarrhea too now

I've long wondered why twitter doesn't do an auto complete for @mentions. Usernames are often hard to remember which makes the updates tedious to create. Nice work on FaceBook's part.

I'm pretty positive when it first started out it did. I'm sure it was too much stress on their already crippled infrastructure and the feature was disabled

every render of a users homepage has a list of "following" names, so the client shouldn't need to go to the server for auto-completion?

Agree. Tweetdeck does this.

I've almost entirely moved to using Facebook status updates instead of Twitter anyway. Allowing photos and auto-previewed links and being able directly see responses seems much nicer to me.

Facebook is copying Twitter's syntax...if anything it shows that Facebook is playing catch-up.

Twitter's advantage is still very distinct: public, compact thought streams that can be easily sliced and diced.

So why is Twitter in trouble? Facebook has semi-public, disparate data that is difficult to parse

Twitter is in trouble because a website with more features (photo albums, apps, blah blah) and a larger community has been consistently adding all of twitter's 'killer' features to their own site. Question: What's to stop facebook from adding public status updates or any other distinct twitter feature? Answer: nothing.

What's to stop facebook...

Their users - they expect privacy. Facebook, like its predecessors, is a walled garden.

Public status updates were already introduced.

And blogs had 'more features' than Twitter too, but as they have proven, artificial constraints can make something popular. The minimalism is pretty much the point.

Can't a site copy another site without it being an attempt to destroy that site? Facebook and Twitter are used very differently, and it would take a lot of backpedaling for Facebook to begin to usurp Twitter's userbase—which is doesn't have to, since the average Twitter user has a Facebook account.

well that is a clear shot across the bow of twitter. I wonder if twitter has any response for this?

They could add an extened profile page, photo album storage tagging and sharing, an event RSVP system, and then get all my friends to sign up.

I don't think that will happen.

I guess they will continue being Twitter, where following involves one click and (in 95% of the cases) not to worry about privacy.

Anybody else not seeing this yet? I'm wondering if it's not fully rolled-out or if I'm just doing it wrong.

yeah, we're rolling it out over the next few weeks.

Oh, sweet! A Facebook person on HN! I thought y'all were super-secretive.

I'm a huge fan.

I assume it's being slowly rolled out, but the official blog entry doesn't even hint at that.

This isn't working for me. Why do I never get the cool facebook features :-(

Everyone wants to be twitter.

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