Facebook is apparently testing out its own version of the age-old away message in Taiwan and Australia, according to a report. Starting Wednesday, the social network began experimenting with what it calls the sidebar status, which is an away message that shows up in the current sidebar pane of Facebook’s mobile apps and disappears after 12 hours or whenever someone updates their status.
Facebook confirmed the news via email. The sidebar status will appear to all of someone’s Facebook friends by default, however the user can play with their sidebar settings to change this. Facebook users can also “pin” their closest friends to the top to catch all their sidebar status updates.
It’s not clear whether Facebook will keep the away message around and roll it out to all of its 1.4 billion users. But if it does, think of it as a smaller feature — another flourish to the social network’s mobile experience that allows people to express themselves.
