Facebook Attribution via Twitter

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Facebook are well known to imitate popular features from other services. I wrote about this several times in 2009, Friendfeed influenced the direction considerably and eventually Facebook acquired the services of the development team.

Status tagging was introduced, the equivalent of Twitter @replies, including the "@" symbol beforehand and a drop-down menu will appear that allows us to choose from our list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. Now it appears that the social network has made available its own version of Twitter’s retweet.

The “via” feature provides the ability to repost another user’s shared items with attribution to the source. This feature is only for posted items at the moment but features like this change user behaviour. I have already begun actively monitoring the Links feed more for what's popular. What next? I would like Pages to become more Google Readeresque, obviously this depends on the brand activity but the engagement I'm experiencing I feel that Pages could potentially take feed readers to the mainstream. Thoughts?