A few days ago I was watching a soccer match between Liverpool FC and Arsenal FC. In doing so, I wanted to call and notify fans of both teams that I was on and I wanted them to cheer up with me, after all, the beauty of watching a match is when you are together but what do you do when you are miles apart and you want to feel like you are together?

Here is when the tag feature come into place. This feature has been used by another dominant social network site, Twitter, fortunately it has been implemented on Facebook. I tagged my friends, one in Botswana, one in the UK, three in Tanzania and one in Japan and soon enough we were all there texting and reacting to the match as it continued. Now a friend of mine was not so happy with me for not tagging them up, I felt bad but there was really nothing I could do as the tagging on facebook has a number limit. Unlike in a note or video where you can tag up to 20 people, on status update you can only tag up to 6 at a time.

This is how you use the '@' symbol to bring friends even closer to your conversation.

1. Type the @ sign where you would like to insert a friends name in the comment.
2. A drop down with a list of your friends will start to show type the name.
3. When you are done composing the message, click share / click enter. This message will be displayed on your friend’s wall and s/he will receive a notification that s/he has been tagged.

Just like any other tag on a photo or video, the person tagged can remove the tag if they don't want to be tagged for any reason. If you want to untag them, you can also visit this friend's profile and remove it from their page.

Cons:
    * The @  function does not work when commenting to a message.
    * The @ function doesn't not work on a lite version of facebook

For those of you who do not use Twitter, as I said before, this method has been implemented there long ago on together with the # (hash) sign. Using the @ sign in Twitter means identifying other users, while using the # sign means identifying keywords and help to index the message so others can find it.