Oh, baby, baby it's a TagWorld

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch reported on TagWorld - a new uber-tagging service. Their vision, from the About page:

build the Social Web by providing a unified set of easy-to-use, web-based services that will let users create and engage in a more meaningful, social experience

Also:

TagWorld sees five fundamental components for building out this new social web infrastructure: people, photos, blogs, tags and storage.

They do a pretty good job at providing an integrated, do-it-all experience, with a slick(er) user interface. The free-form tagging interface is still somewhat lacking to my taste. They have a cool tag-by-selecting-from-a-tag-cloud user interface in some of the areas. Bookmarks, like pretty much everything else, can be tagged as public or private.

The search experience is real pleasure though. A slidebar for indicating the number of results you'd like to see at once. Thumbnails of the web sites in your bookmarks.

The service has a strong "mass consumer" flavor to it. Also, it seems to be one of the only Web 2.0 services developed using .NET technology, and not LAMP. No, I'm not hinting at a connection between the two facts. Almost not all :)

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Del.icio.us : MichaelArrington, blog, bookmark, delicious, flickr, search, social, tag, tagging, tagworld, user interface, web2.0

about del.icio.us

Michael Arrington summarized the new del.icio.us features in "Wow! Del.icio.us rolls out more stuff" on TechCrunch .

The Del.icio.us Search Engine, now available to non-delicious users as well, puts delicious on par with Furl (a Looksmart company), Wink, and others who are leveraging tagging to create a better general purpose search engine.

Does anyone know if Google are already leveraging tags from the various tagging services directly in their PageRank algorithm?

David Weinberger posted an interesting summary of two sessions that Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us gave at the Berkman Center @ Harvard a few days ago. I find the summary of the first session particularly interesting:

Currently at delicious: 5M links, about 10M posts, on average about two tags per item. About 500,000 unique tags. Growth in tags is slow.

500,000 unique tags... that's a good number to take into account when designing tagging systems or application that leverage information from tagging services.

My personal favorite:

Q: Why "tags" instead of "keywords" in coming up with the terminology?

A: It was inadvertently clever. I wish I could say I did it intentionally. Typically, when keywords are used, you don't see a list of the aggregated keywords. Maybe it is a slightly new thing.

... and so the revolution has begun, with tags, tag clouds, tag bundles, meta-tags, taggers, ... and has turned the tag "tagging" into one of the most used tags :)

Oh yeah. Joshua also got hold of delicious.com. So maybe people will actually be able to find delicious :)

Tags: tags tagging folksonomy web2.0 delicious search MichaelArrington DavidWeinberger