Facebook announced that it would soon support Twitter-like @mentions a few days ago. Today, Facebook actually enabled this functionality. Now, when you type a status update and type ‘@,’ an auto-updating drop-down menu with the names of your Facebook friends will appear. While users could always write the name of their friends in a status update, these names are now linked to a user’s profile. Soon, Facebook will also allow users to tag friends in applications as well.
Whenever somebody tags you in a status update, a notification will appear. For now, however, there is no place where you can easily find all the updates where somebody tagged you. It is also worth noting that while Twitter actually displays the @ symbol in status updates, Facebook just replaces it with the full name of the tagged person.
Obviously, this now makes Facebook even more like Twitter than ever before. At the same time, though, this is also a very useful feature, as it allows your friends to easily head over to the profile of the friends you tagged in your updates. Facebook’s Twitter-like new Facebook Lite interface, however, doesn’t support @mentions, yet.
Tip of the hat to Zee at The Next Web for being the first to notice that this feature was live.