Starting Wednesday, the social network began experimenting with what it calls the sidebar status, which is an away message that shows up in the current sidebar pane of Facebook's mobile apps and disappears after 12 hours or whenever someone updates their status. Facebook confirmed the news via email
The sidebar status will appear to all of someone's Facebook friends by default, however the user can play with their sidebar settings to change this. Facebook users can also "pin" their closest friends to the top to catch all their sidebar status updates.
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The sidebar status will only appear to the people a user messages most, their so-called "favorites," and won't appear in users' profiles or News Feeds.
IMAGE: FACEBOOK
The sidebar status as a concept has existed in different shapes and forms over the years, although this is the first time Facebook has tinkered with it. AOL's Instant Messenger service, or AIM, which launched in 1997, helped popularize the idea. Users could choose from a preset mix of away statuses or write their own pithy explanations as to why they were missing in action. Other services, like Google Hangouts, offer a feature similar to the sidebar status, too.
It's not clear whether Facebook will keep the away message around and roll it out to all of its 1.4 billion users. But if it does, think of it as a smaller feature — another flourish to the social network's mobile experience that allows people to express themselves.
Updated April 15 5:18 pm P.T. to clarify that sidebar status updates appear to someone's Facebook friends by default.
[H/T The Verge]
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