Ten minutes of searching Twitter, Facebook, Google & Mashable have turned up no other posts regarding what appears to be Facebook's latest homage to one of Twitter's lesser known features... the "via".
Since Twitter brought in their controversial new retweet feature, it seems the use of "via" to indicate the user who provided the original link has fallen into disuse. Those who feared it was therefore lost forever will be thankful to hear that Facebook have seen fit to resurrect it.
When you see a post on another user's Facebook feed, you are presented with a 'Share' button through which you can post the item in question to your own feed. So far so social media, right? Well previously these shared posts to your feed were unattributed. This meant you could pass the link off as your own (to those people who don't follow the user you stole it from anyway) but now Facebook are making an effort to show your 'Friends' who it was that originally created the post by adding a "via" followed by the user's name. This is in no way similar to Twitter's new retweet feature that makes an effort to show your 'Followers' who it was that originally created the post.
Apart from making people look a little less cool (now that you can see that it is one of their more interesting friends who was actually providing all those awesome YouTube links to cute cats) the point to note here is Facebook's continuing drive to encourage it's users to widen their online social circle. Why show where posts are originating from (with a handy clickable link) if you don't want to encourage more socialising on your social network?
I have no problem with this new feature (being the guy who finds all those cute kitty videos) but many others may feel that Facebook's continual erosion of user privacy and it's attempts to force them to make new 'Friends' may be less appealing.
Update
Since I made my post last night, Mashable have written their own piece about Facebook's newest feature.
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