New "via" feature is the retweet of Facebook

Filed under: Social Software, Microblogging

"Retweeting" -- reposting someone else's content on your own account -- is so popular on Twitter that there was a huge user debate about how the site should handle official support for it. Facebook seems to have taken notice, introducing its own retweet-like "via" feature, which allows you to post other people's shared items in your own activity stream (automatically attributed to the original poster, of course).

So far, "via" only works for shared links, so you can't use it for someone else's status updates. Since Facebook is a lot less private now, maybe they're working on aggregating links to further their ambitions as a real-time search property. I can see this feature being interesting, but I hope there will be controls to cut vias from specific people (or vias altogether, even) out of your stream. After all, it would get irritating very quickly to see the same link posted by 10 different mutual friends.

[via AllFacebook]

New "via" feature is the retweet of Facebook originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 16 Jan 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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