The away message is making its way back into social networking thanks to a new experiment Facebook is conducting in Taiwan and Australia.
The feature, called a sidebar status, comes in the form of a message that users can post in the sidebar of their iOS and Android apps, according to The Verge. All you have to do is swipe right in social network's flagship app, and the sidebar will pop up and show the friends you send messages to the most.
Away messages were previously a big part of instant messaging, which was a popular tool for letting your friends know what you were doing while you weren't on your computer in the 1990s before Facebook stepped onto the scene in the 2000s. The feature came in the form of AOL's Instant Messenger service (AIM) and ICQ.
Sidebar statuses are designed to show what you're doing at the moment you post it, Quartz reported. Messages will only stay up for 12 hours before it expires, or until the user clears or updates their status.
Users' friends will be the only ones that can see the messages by default, and statuses won't appear in the main feed of updates.
Whether Facebook will make the sidebar status an official feature for its users after tests has yet to be revealed.
