Turns out, celebrities aren't just like us. Facebook has just announced a new app called "Mentions" that is meant to separate famous people from the riffraff.
The new app, which is meant to give special treatment to celebrities in hopes of generating more public content, currently doesn't work for normal Facebook users. For now, Mentions can only be accessed by people with "verified public figure" accounts. People with such accounts have public pages that users can view but not add comments to. The easiest way to spot verified public figure accounts is to look for a check mark next to a person's name.
"From cheering on World Cup players to checking out updates from favorite celebrities, there are more than a billion interactions between public figures and their fans on Facebook every week. We want to make these interactions even better," said Facebook Product Manager Allison Swope in a press release.
In an interview with Recode, Facebook product managers said that the new feature has encouraged celebrities to post twice as much as before. Mentions is said to be geared towards posting status updates, videos and photos. The new app also has a tab that celebrities can use to quickly monitor what people have written about them. The feature, which, not surprisingly, is triggered by the word "mentions," is similar to Twitter's @ tab function.
One of the first celebrity posts using the Mentions app was from singer Tyrese Gibson, who used the platform to celebrate Apple's $3 billion acquisition of Beats with Dr. Dre. The video, which came out before the deal was formalized, was taken down hours after it was posted.
While the new app is sure to exclude the majority of Facebook's 1.2 billion users, it's not as exclusive as it sounds. A Facebook executive told Recode that it will initially be rolled out the feature to "tens of thousands of users." The VIP list is expected to grow once the social network introduces the app in other countries. Finally, the last people to gain entrance into the holy ground that is Facebook's exclusive club would be "public figures" with normal Facebook user accounts.
