Facebook Friends

The latest update to the Facebook iOS and Android apps will now let you tag your friends in status posts and comments. The feature, which has long been available on the Facebook website, can be activated by typing "@" followed by the name of the friend you want to tag in your comment or status update. You can use this feature on the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad or any Android device running the latest version of the Facebook app. Quiz: The week in business Facebook has also added a "Share" button next to the "Like" and "Comment" buttons.

A new iPhone app that trawls Facebook for photos of scantily clad friends is raising the ire of privacy advocates and anti-child porn activists. The application, called Badabing, searches tagged photos and posted albums from as many as five Facebook friends at a time. The app returns the Facebook pictures as a list that can be easily liked, bookmarked and shared. Users upload more than 2.5 billions photos to Facebook each month, and some of those users have no doubt clicked through a friend's vacation album to find bikini pictures.

Integrating Facebook to your iPhone 5 is a nifty new feature of Apple's latest operating system, iOS 6. When you activate your Facebook account on your iPhone 5, iOS 6 will offer to import your Facebook calendar and contact information. But one drawback we found with integrating Facebook to your iPhone 5 is that you'll end up with duplicate contact information for some of your Facebook friends. For example, I have a friend that goes by "Mike" on my iPhone 5. But on Facebook, he goes by "Michael.

Here's a hotel search engine for the social media-obsessed. Name: Tripbirds.com What it does: Sorts hotel searches according to where your friends have stayed, which hotel has the most "likes" (as on Facebook) or Instagrams (as in photos shared on Instagram), social media interactivity in general - and, yes, price and star ratings. What's hot: I love that when I search for hotels in New York or San Francisco, Tripbirds tells me which of my Facebook friends have stayed there (and - scary - when they visited)

Can TripAdvisor's latest Facebook app take on Yelp and its food reviews? I'm still waiting for dessert. Name: Local Picks Facebook App, apps.facebook.com/localpicks What it does : Aggregates advice about more than 850,000 restaurants in 200 countries. Find out which restaurants and food trucks your Facebook friends approve of. What's hot: Of course I want to know which restaurants my friends think are cool. But because many of them are not yet participating, I think the tool to make your own list of restaurants is the most handy.

Facebook has made a habit of advancing its interests at the expense of its customers, whether by weakening its privacy policy, tracking users' movements around the Web or radically reconfiguring the way information is displayed on the site's pages. So it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that while the company's initial stock offering was a boon to the company and insiders, it's been a costly disappointment for the general public. Now, some investors are accusing the company and its bankers of playing the public for suckers, sharing pessimistic revenue projections with a few insiders but not average investors.

SAN JOSE — Wondering where to go on vacation this year, and what to do? A growing number of "social travel" start-ups offer alternatives to the trusty, dusty guidebook. Sites like Twigmore and Triptrotting help you troll your social networks for friends who have friends in new places, then hit those people up for advice from a local's perspective — or arrange meet-ups when you get there. Another new site, Trippy, helps you keep track of all those interesting places you've come across on the Web while researching travel destinations.

Researchers at Harvard University have gotten to the bottom of why so many people are compelled to share our every thought, movement, like and want through social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and Pinterest. In a series of experiments, the researchers found that the act of disclosing information about oneself activates the same sensation of pleasure in the brain that we get from eating, getting money or having sex. This may help explain recent surveys of Internet use that show that roughly 80% of posts to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook consist simply of announcements about one's own immediate experience.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Attention, students: If someone you don't know tries to friend you on Facebook, ask yourself whether it might actually be your high school principal. Consider "Suzy Harriston. " Her profile picture showed only penguins, and a bunch of students friended her despite having no idea who Suzy was. Then came the warning: "Whoever is friends with Suzy Harriston on Facebook needs to drop them," a former Clayton, Mo., football player wrote on April 5, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Researchers at Harvard have gotten to the bottom of why so many of us are compelled to share our every thought, movement, like and want through mediums like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and Pinterest. In a series of experiments, the researchers found that the act of disclosing information about oneself activates the same sensation of pleasure in the brain that we get from eating food, getting money or having sex. It's all a matter of degrees of course, (talking about yourself isn't quite as pleasurable as sex for most of us)