Google Messages is making headway on support for @mentions

Being able to get someone’s attention by sending them an @username just feels incredibly natural to so many of us after years and years of these kind of interactions across social media. At this point, we’re honestly just surprised to find cases where it doesn’t work, and while the list of supported platforms includes Google stuff like Chats, so far that hasn’t extended to Messages. Earlier this year, we brought you an early preview of how @mentions in Messages were coming together, and now we’ve got some progress to share.

Last time around, we showed you how Messages was preparing to let you send these @mentions, but we weren’t yet able to preview what the experience would look like to the recipient, and our tests came through looking like regular old texts.

We’re now making some headway towards learning how Messages will react to you being mentioned, and have been able to trigger the notice you see above — when you’re @mentioned in a conversation, you’ll get that @ symbol in your chat list.

Another small tweak we’ve identified concerns how you’re able to tag users like this in the first place. Before, we only saw these type of @suggestions when explicitly leading with an @ character, but now we’re able to get recommendations just by beginning to enter the name of another user in the chat.

When this finally goes live, Google will want to educate Messages users about how to use the @mention system, and we’ve recently been able to surface some of the usage tips that will appear:

That’s about it for now, and we’re still no closer to knowing when Google might be ready to flip the switch on this upgrade. That said, we’ll keep digging around in the hopes of spotting any further progress as Messages devs continue to flesh things out — and loop you in on all our biggest finds.