Facebook Introduces Suggestions for Status Updates

Facebook is continuously trying to become more efficient and more user-friendly so they came up with a new setting: offering suggesting for status updates has been recently added to the list of new and/or enhanced features.

The newly implemented feature allows users to easier update their status message by integrating relevant links to pages, users or groups they have already connected to.

Some would argue that auto-suggesting is not in fact an innovation, since it resembles Google Suggest, a service which aims to offer search predictions based on comparing the keyword with popular searches.

However, Facebook’s status suggestions do not include random and unrelated alternatives, but are rather more focused on displaying a drop-down list which only contains connected pages, thus providing a better chance for users to find what they are looking for.

Another positive aspect of Facebook’s latest feature is that the suggestions appear as the users type their status, and that they only need to enter the first three letters of a proper noun to get a list of appropriate options.

Furthermore, the drop-down list is case sensitive, and only names that are capitalized will be suggested – and this helps Facebook keep the suggestions list relatively short and to the point.

Due to the fact that it was recently launched, the latest Facebook feature does not provide all the functions one might expect, since users will not be suggested any external pages they have marked as ‘Like’.

Nonetheless, there might be another side to this feature-roll out. There is a lot of buzz over the media related to the newly presented Facebook Places, and since the auto-suggestions were launched about the same would also imply that the two might be connected.

Even though it is possible that the suggestions were basically meant to help users add references to certain places and locations, this has not been confirmed just yet, and until an official statement is released, Facebook will simply advise users on relevant status updates.