A week after winning applause across the blogosphere for taking the big step of opening up its API, social networking site Facebook today launched a new feature called notes – essentially a blogging tool.
The best thing about the new notes tool may be that users can syndicate the full contents of other blogs elsewhere onto their Facebook page and individual imported entries can be commented on in Facebook. Blog posts, or notes as the company prefers they are called, can be tagged and commented on. When notes posts are tagged with another user’s name that entry is delivered to the user in question. This is how Facebook photos work as well. Notes can also be posted by mobile phone. Privacy options in notes appear typical of the rest of the site. Users can view their friends’ notes from inside their notes dashboard.
We tested the notes feature and found that, much to our chagrin, we were unable to embed a Paris Hilton video from YouTube in Facebook. Javascript can’t be used either, but the notes will interpret some HTML.
It looks to me like Facebook is catching up with the state of the art, but with its own unique twist. As Liz Gannes at Gigaom points out, the company says that notes pages are not blogs “because then you’d be a blogger.” Oh, the indignity!