Developer Tip: How to Tag Friends in Status Updates from Your App (Undocumented)
Earlier today, Facebook released its new “status tagging” feature to all users, a new way to tag friends, Pages, groups, and events in status updates much like mentions on @twitter work.
However, while status tagging is a powerful tool for users and Page administrators, Facebook hasn’t officially launched any new API’s for developers to take advantage of the feature. Last week, Andrew Huang, the product manager at Facebook responsible for status tagging, told us that while Facebook waiting to see how the feature plays out before they expand it, Facebook is thinking about how new Platform APIs could enable users to tag Facebook connections.
Nevertheless, some developers are finding at least one way to tag friends in status updates from apps. All you have to do is use the following format in status updates, and Facebook will automatically display status tags:
Tagging @[USERID:blah] in a status update from my app
Where “USERID” is the numeric Facebook ID of the user you want to tag, and “blah” can be any string (Facebook will always print and link the name of the tagged user no matter what you put here, but you must enter some text here in order for this to work). You can also simply type this syntax in the regular Facebook publisher, and it will work.
Thanks to Tom Waddington for the tip.
September 14th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
I love this new feature!
September 14th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
You should also note that blah is the string of text that will be displayed when the user tagged UNTAGS himself, or, I assume, if the user is not allowed to see the tagged user’s name.
September 14th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
can it be done by just using the person’s unique name they assigned to their profile page , cause remembering that from numbers is much easier.
September 14th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
It seems that facebook has assigned IDs for every Page, Group and Event. These IDs have the same format as the profiles.
Look at this line http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100484820802. It is itune page !
while this link http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=2208583135 is some group.
So, you know how it will be working.
September 14th, 2009 at 9:20 pm
[...] While there is no documented way to tag users within status updates some developers have already figured out a way. If you use the following format, you’ll be able to tag users from within status updates via [...]
September 15th, 2009 at 12:55 am
[...] API gibt, können auch Anwendungen ein tagging für die Nutzer der Anwendung auslösen. Hier ist beschrieben, wie es geht. Voraussetzung ist natürlich, dass der Nutzer der Anwendung das posten von Status [...]
September 15th, 2009 at 2:24 am
[...] da facebook al riguardo, le applicazioni possono attivare il tagging per i propri utenti. Qui maggiori informazioni su questo punto. Ovviamente il presupposto e’ che l’utente [...]
September 15th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
[...] While there is no documented way to tag users within status updates some developers have already figured out a way. If you use the following format, you’ll be able to tag users from within status updates via [...]
September 26th, 2009 at 11:14 am
so how do you tag people in your status sorry im confused ?
March 11th, 2010 at 11:34 pm
“So, how do you tag people in your status?
Sorry, I’m confused.”
Look! Punctuation and all. Free of charge!
Anyway, this is only meant for developpers. When you want to tag someone in your status update, you’ll get a nice list of people after you’ve typed “@”.
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Has anyone else noticed that, by tagging people like this, they don’t actually get a notification?