Facebook Takes a Hint From Google+

Facebook has made some new changes in the past few days and the new system seems a bit familiar. Facebook changed the way that a user updates their status messages and the options that user has when updating.

One obvious addition, is the choice to decide who receives your updates. You can chose to update the "public", or all of your friends, or select a "list" that you have created to make the status more private. This function is, oh, so similar to Google + which allows it's users to update their status messages to certain "circles".

Another change, Facebook has now made it EXTREMELY easy to tag a friend in a post and add a location to the update. Prior to this change, in order to add a tag or location, users needed to type in the add manually by typing, "@" then the name of their friend/location.

To further simplify things, Facebook has taken out the link to add a link, now allowing users to manually type the link into the status update (as opposed to adding it separately by clicking on the "Add a link" button).

Although, these are all functions that improve Facebook and, despite the fact that Facebook seems to be steadily staying alive in this social media shift, I am unsure how effective Facebook is becoming when compared to other social sites.

As always, keep up with me on Twitter and check out my Social After-show for top trending TV shows.