New York — Slowly but surely, striving to keep tech geeks on their toes with the never-ending acquisition and acqui-hire cycle and API wars, social networking outfit Facebook today said that it is giving developers a new toy: the capability for users of open graph applications to mention their friends in their messages from those apps, calling it “Mention Tagging.”
With the addition of mention tagging, which empowers outside developers to loop in the functionality to enable users to tag Facebook friends in these third party app posts. So, when friends are mentioned in posts from open graph apps, their friends’ names will link to their timelines, the posts will also appear on their timelines (or in their timeline reviews, if they are using that feature), and they will receive notifications.
For example, when you click a photo with Instagram, you cannot tag your Facebook friend in it even though you are sending the image to the site–but should this feature become integrated (while considering Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and their unique Open Graph integration, you have to imagine it will), you would be able to. Facebook offers Foursquare up as an example, explaining that your check-ins can now pull in and tag your Facebook friends in them.
“With this persistently requested feature, companies like foursquare can implement user mentions that similarly functions like they do in posts on Facebook,” explains Facebook’s Cindy Li, on the company’s Developer Blog. “When people mention a friend in an Open Graph app, the narrative on Facebook links the person’s name to their timeline, and their friend will receive a notification. The story will also be added to the friend’s timeline or, if enabled, to timeline review. There are no privacy changes associated with this new feature.”
In fact, Foursquare is adopting the feature itself.
“Want to intimate a friend that you are trying the dish they recommended, invite them to join you at the bar, or let the world know you are hanging out with them? You can mention them in your foursquare check-in, and automatically tag them on Facebook and Twitter too!” says Foursquare’s Talisa Chang.
Facebook clarifies that mention tagging is not to be confused with Action Tagging, for instance — any apps you use to illustrate doing something with friends (running, hiking, eating, cooking, watching a movie, etc) will not be privy to the new feature. Now, developers who integrate this into their apps will allow users to mention other Facebook friends right inline in their messages.
Here is the difference in how they appear on Facebook:
According to the announcement, “If you choose to execute mention tagging, you will need to provide users with a tokenizer or some other way to know that they can reference their friends.” Developers will also need to resubmit their actions and approval requests for user messages and tags as well as provide information on how they want to enable the feature in their app.
As a matter of fact, along with this, users should anticipate quite a few apps to get on board with this in the near future — according to Facebook engineer Matt Kelly, it should be coming up in the WordPress plugin soon. It is a great way to bring yet more attention to your own app and an opportunity to get some eyes that use Facebook (the general population) but not necessarily smaller social platforms (which, in comparison, they all are) looking at what their friends are tagging them in.
Nevertheless, this timely change is a big boon for developers who are using Facebook Open Graph as a means to boost adoption and engagement. Friend-tagging features that can spread across Facebook means potentially huge numbers of new users being exposed to your app via the most trustworthy source of all — their nearest, dearest Facebook buddies.
“This new feature is perfect for situations when people are doing activities where they want to reference friends,” writes Facebooker Li today on the company blog.
“We are happy to bring support for mention tagging to Open Graph and can not wait to see all the new use cases this enables,” Li said.
Finally, developers looking to implement mention tagging can find the documentation here.