Facebook notify tool lets people spam their friends about their new status updates

The tool appears to be intended as a way of stopping people from including endless tags in their posts or comments

(Getty)

Facebook is testing out a new way of annoying everyone about your new posts.

The site is rolling out a feature that lets people “Notify a few friends about this post”.

It appears to be a way of letting people give others a heads up that they’ve done a post, while avoiding the usual, very annoying ways of doing that. Previously, users could only tag people in the post or the comments – which had the effect of clogging everything up with text and leading everything to appear on people’s timelines.

The new tool is intended to be “more discreet”, according to Facebook.

The notify tool – which is completely separate from the now-defunct Notify news app that was launched by Facebook last year – still sends people a notification.

As such it is presumably aimed at letting people have actual conversations in the comments, rather than using them as a way of notifying people.

In turn that could help Facebook encourage more people to post about their own lives – something that is dropping quickly on Facebook and reportedly is a huge worry for the site.