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Stephen Colbert big on Facebook's new photo tags

Stephen Colbert gave a shout-out to Facebook's new Page photo-tagging feature during last night's Colbert report. (It starts at the 2:07 mark in this video clip.)"Now Americans can whore themselves out on Facebook, instead of just whoring themselves out on Craigslist," Colbert quipped about the new feature that encourages users to tag Facebook Pages for brands or celebrities featured in their pho

Stephen Colbert gave a shout-out to Facebook's new Page photo-tagging feature during last night's Colbert report. (It starts at the 2:07 mark in this video clip.)

"Now Americans can whore themselves out on Facebook, instead of just whoring themselves out on Craigslist," Colbert quipped about the new feature that encourages users to tag Facebook Pages for brands or celebrities featured in their photos. Sounds pretty dumb, right?

Not to wily Facebook, which doesn't miss an opportunity to attract more companies to the social network by expanding the power of social recommendation.

For example, if your friend likes Coca Cola, you're more likely to like that soda too — or on Facebook, "Like" the Coca Cola product Page. As it is, photo sharing is Facebook's most popular application — and tagged photos show up in news feeds, pretty much guaranteeing clicks to Facebook Product Pages.

Facebook recently promoted this new feature with examples including Coca Cola, as well as Kanye West, "who is technically categorized as a musician/band, indicating that Pages with a wide range of categories that represent people may be able to take advantage of the new feature," Inside Facebook reports. Just so long as Facebook can "minimize the impact of the few pages and users that try to abuse" the new function.

What's in it for you, the product-tagging Facebook users?

"Photo-taggers could charge companies based on their number of fans and demand top dollar for tags in their most viewed photos," Colbert posits. "Think of all the windfall you could reap from dropping products into your most precious life moments."

More on the annoying way we live now:

Helen A.S. Popkin goes blah blah blah about the Internet. Tell her to get a real job on Twitter and/or Facebook.