Thursday, October 20, 2005

Tagging UI

Well, Yahoo! recently introduced a beta version of their own social-bookmarking-tagging-sharing thingie - My Web 2.0 (a revamped version of the original My Web service introduced in April).

Yes, it tags. Tags are comma-separated, non-hierarchical.

Does this settle the argument?

Well, a Yahoo!-branded social-bookmarking-tagging-sharing thingie may settle more than one argument... might save a lot of time in those VC weekly investment committee meetings...

Does it all really matter? Danny Sullivan did a fascinating post on tagging and why it sucks. Some excerpts:

"Yahoo talked to me this week about how 70 percent of all items on Flickr are tagged, but then it immediately qualified without prompting that because Flickr is a photo service, tagging is much more essential."


"...But what happens when you've created hundreds of tags for thousands of pages? Are you going to browse pages? Everyone largely abandoned browsing directory categories ages ago because keyword search was like a warp drive to zip you to what you wanted..."

Good stuff.

1 comment:

YanivG said...

Mind-Valley - thanks for the pointer to blinklist, already checked it out, pretty cool. The UI is considerably more slick than the other services out there, though I still find the auto-complete functionality not-streamlined. If you really want to use it, you have to let go of your keyboard in the mid of associative tag typing, reach for the mouse, navigate through a small list on the *other* side of the control, click, and then scroll the control back to the right-hand side. Check out the link posted by Eyal in one of the comments here a while ago, to a much more streamlined auto-complete control.