Here is what i did, really simple, and provided your tab links have an ID associated with them you can get the href attribute and pass that over to the function that shows the tab contents:
<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery(document).ready(function() {
var hash = document.location.hash;
var prefix = "tab_";
if (hash) {
var tab = jQuery(hash.replace(prefix,"")).attr('href');
jQuery('.nav-tabs a[href='+tab+']').tab('show');
}
});
</script>
Then in your url you can add the hash as something like: #tab_tab1, the 'tab_' part is removed from the hash itself so the ID of the actual tab link in the nav-tabs (tabid1) is placed after this, so your url would look something like: www.mydomain.com/index.php#tab_tabid1.
This works perfect for me and hope it helps someone else :-)