The strength of the Internet in general relies on the ability to link between pages and websites, between items of common interest and to build natural flows of information. If you link to another site or a site links to you, there is, or rather needs to be, good reason. Commercial websites may stand or fail based on their ability to link out and more especially retain back links to their site and to show that this method of handshaking adds strength and reasoning to their very existence.
While websites are busy linking within a commercial environment as they strive to sell their products or services to the consumer in general, social media sites are springing up and forming a bond between individual people, friends and acquaintances. Many social networking purists would advocate that those two activities should not meet and that social networking should be purely that, social. However, social media will invariably become a part of the marketing sphere over time, especially as the promoters of the major sites, Facebook, Twitter and others strive to develop a business model and earn more significant revenues.
Twitter has maintained a means of referencing other people within your “tweets” for some time now. By using the @ symbol, you can effectively tag other “tweeps” and create a form of hyperlink to these users. This form of tagging is a way of signaling that you are responding to another Twitter user.
Within Facebook, you have only recently been able to notify the world that you have an association of some kind with another Facebook user by tagging them in a photograph or video. Once you do this, their friends are notified of your tag and can view the situation or occasion and the result may be searched. Now, however, Facebook has introduced a new tagging feature that is sure to compete with the Twitter functionality. You can tag someone within a status update or post, creating a direct link between the content of your posts and that person’s Facebook page.
To tag someone in the new Facebook world, all you need to do is enter the @ symbol as you are typing and Facebook will automatically present to you a drop-down list of all your friends. By typing in the first couple of letters of your friend’s name it will automatically reduce the list and focus in for you. When you publish your post or status update, a reader may click on that person’s hyperlinked name and be transferred to their Facebook page.
It is not difficult to imagine that Facebook will expand this concept so you may tag events and other activities, creating additional awareness and social buzz.
Are you seeing a Facebook versus Twitter battle developing here?
Adam Toren