In January 2009 the era of API had started. Twitter was the first one to open Status API. This gave the ease to the developers to being the status updates in their applications. Here by, TweetDeck, Seesmic and other suits introduced the Status API integration functionality. At that time Twitter’s popularity was increasing day by day and Facebook was still missing many features as compared to Twitter.
In April, Facebook introduced a service which provided the ease of subscribing to Pages and receive updates via text message and later in September, Facebook copied a functionality of Twitter which is most commonly used today, the “@” replies/mentions. Also with applications like Twitter on Facebook, you can update status on Twitter and your Facebook profile update will automatically follow it. In short Facebook spent the whole year in competing with Twitter by duplicating its functionalities.
The latest feature which a replicate of Twitter is the “retweet”. Yesterday Facebook introduced “via” feature which is same as “retweet” feature of Facebook. Now you can share anybody’s news feed and instead of mentioning it by ”@” simply use “via”.
All you need to do is, go to the News Feed item you want to share, click on “Share”, and here after a window will popup in which you have to add a private message, there you will see a “via” and your friend’s name with it,and when you post it it will come with the same “via” and your friends name. There is also an option to remove the “via” option. This feature is only available for only the links shared by your friends and pages, you cannot share any status updates and photos.
The share “via” feature is really a big step in the Twitterfication of Facebook. It is a big attempt of Facebook to popularise itself in micro-blogging platform.
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