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Popular social networking site Facebook is now supporting the @ symbol for tagging friends in posts and status updates. The company said last week it would move toward adopting the convention, which started on Twitter.

The symbol has been part of Twitter etiquette for a long time. When you want to say something publicly to someone, or to include a link to their profile in your tweet, you put an ‘@’ symbol in front of their username. (Example: “At the TechCrunch50 conference with @anthonyha.”)

You can now do the same thing on Facebook: when you identify a friend in a status update, they’ll receive a notification and the status change will appear on the wall in their profiles. If it’s too embarrassing, they can also untag themselves. The feature will auto-generate names when you enter part of a friend’s name.

It could open up a lot of doors for tracking a user’s relationships and activity through the network. You could potentially search for all public updates involving a friend as on Twitter’s search engine. It could enable a lot of the customer relations management technology that’s evolved on the Twitter network. On Twitter, if you complain publicly about a brand like a small start-up or even a large airline like Virgin America, their customer representatives could potentially contact you to fix the situation.

Because Twitter is completely public with all of its updates, it’s been able to evolve much more rapidly than Facebook in some areas. This is just another example of Facebook copying what’s been successful on the rival social network. In its last major overhaul, the company retooled the design to focus on a stream of live updates from your friends rather than their relatively more static profile pages.

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