Facebook For Android Now Allows Tagging Friends In Status Updates

Tagging Facebook friends in status updates, photos, videos and even in comments is a widely used feature, which has both advantages and disadvantages.

When you want to start a discussion with multiple Facebook friends, instead of starting a new group or writing the same message on everyone’s wall, all you can do is compose a new status update and tag the people whom you want to engage in the discussion. Your friends will get a notification that you’ve tagged them in a wall post, they will surely come down looking at your wall post and this is how the conversation begins.

Unfortunately it has some disadvantages too.

When a whole bunch of people tag you in photos, videos – the same tagging feature becomes really spammy in nature. You can prevent Facebook friends from tagging you in photos but sometimes, even close friends do this mistake over and over again.

The good news however is that Facebook has released a new update to their Android App which allows users to tag Facebook friends in Status updates from the Android application. The same tagging convention is followed – use an @ before the name of your friend and you should see the autocomplete suggestions, as shown in the right.

First you will need to update Facebook for Android app to it’s latest version. You can click through this link from your Android device to go to the Android market and update the app to it’s latest version (1.5.3)

Surprisingly, you can’t tag Facebook friends in comment replies from the Android app, as you can do from the desktop browser. I tried replying to a comment in my Facebook profile and tried tagging a friend in the comment message, but that didn’t worked. Maybe, it’s a work in progress

Here is one more tip. Instead of typing in the whole name, simply enter the first few characters and you should see the autocomplete suggestions of your Facebook friends whose name starts with the same characters. Another thing to note is that sometimes, you may see suggestions based on with whom you were conversing in the particular message thread but overall , this is really good and makes tagging easy for Android users.