If copying is the best form of flattery then Twitter must be feeling really flattered by Facebook over the last few days.

First the advent of Facebook Lite and its pretty obvious way of makings its interface look like a Twitter layout on steroids. Now the latest form of flattery shown by Facebook towards Twitter is that you can use the ‘@’ symbol to tag your friends like you do in Twitter.

How does it work?

• Where you type in your comment start with ‘@’ and then type the name of the friend you want to tag.
• Immediately you will see a drop down list of your friends as you start typing. See the above pic.
• The messages will be displayed on your friend’s wall and he/she will also receive a notification.
• If the message is unwanted, the person receiving the update can also remove the tag.
• The ‘@’ function does not work while adding a comment to a message and Facebook Lite too does not support it.

Facebook has made the ‘@’ functionality look far better than it does on Twitter and that is a credit to them.

Twitter has grown phenomenally because it is a public forum and its profiles are all open to public. Now I doubt that is something Facebook would want to copy!