y.ah.oo!

Yahoo! acquired del.icio.us yesterday, proving once again that among the big 4, they are the one who actually "get it".

Joshua's announcement on del.icio.us was aptly titled "y.ah.oo!".

They couldn't have made a better choice of course. Despite its often-discussed shortcomings, and maybe somewhat because of them, del.icio.us has the liveliest, most vibrant and active community from the social bookmarking crowd. The gentleness track record that Yahoo demonstrated with Yahoozation of Flickr might help making sure that this community won't walk away.

Walking away should be a real concern - since switching from one social bookmarking service to another is very, very easy today.

Reminder: Yahoo introduced their own del.icio.us-like service, My Web 2.0, not so long ago. The service was not as successful as you'd expect, with "only 424K saved pages and about a quarter of that in tags". I said back then: "… might save a lot of time in those VC weekly investment committee meetings". I guess that was somewhat premature :)

It'd be interesting to see what will the result of this ongoing process - the Flickrization of Y.ah.oo!. One thing is sure - with so many tagged web objects, and, even more important, so much information on which users act as a de-facto authority on what's interesting, Yahoo!'s search engine should get quite a boost in the relevancy of its results.

Now that my photos are on Yahoo's Flickr and my bookmarks on Yahoo's del.icio.us, will Yahoo be able to get me - and, slightly more important, others :) - to move from typing "google" when I think web search to typing - hmm... what is the URL for Yahoo's search thingie? Maybe I should start memorizing it..

There is something poetic about this battle between the two giants, with one betting on algorithms and server farms, and the other betting on people.

A different way to look at it: Google is about empowering people through the machine. Yahoo is about empowering people through people, with the machine as an aggregator. Oh yeah, and Amazon, making an attempt at empowering the machine through people :)


Technorati : delicious, flickr, google, amazon, search, my web, tagging, yahoo
Del.icio.us : delicious, flickr, google, amazon, search, my web, tagging, yahoo

Wink

Wink, launched almost two months ago and now accepting beta users, is interesting.

Half delicious-like social bookmarking (with tagging, duh.), half-Wiki, with a bit of Outfoxed

The Wink user scenario begins pretty much like a search engine - a small text box, with a "Search" button next to it. Enter a search term, click Search.

You will get two sets of search results - first, links which were already tagged and rated by Wink users (ordered using Wink's TagRank), and second, standard Google search results. For each link in either of these two sets, you can add the link to your favorites, tag it, rate it or mark it as spam.

In addition, you can view the Wiki entry related to your search term, edit it if needed or create a new one if one doesn't exist already. Plus, you get a list of related search terms.

Other features - the ability to aggregate links into collections, and to subscribe to other users' collections.

Pretty cool. A potentially smooth integration between the search, bookmarking, tagging and content creation processes.

However, since it's going to be uphill battle getting us to switch from typing Google whenever we think "search for pages", they might be better off packing all this wonderful functionality into a browser plugin, Outfoxed-style (or integrate with Flock).

Technorati : delicious, flock, outfoxed, rank, search, spam, tag, tagging, web 2.0, wiki, wink
Del.icio.us : delicious, flock, outfoxed, rank, search, spam, tag, tagging, web 2.0, wiki, wink

The Flickrization of Yahoo

Erick Schonfeld wrote in Business 2.0 about the effects of the Flickr purchase on the Yahoo culture, and Yahoo's approach to Social Media and amateur-created content. An interesting read.

"Yahoo has done the best job of the large guys of getting the concept," says tech guru Esther Dyson, who was an early investor in Flickr.

I agree :)

On the other hand, the article presents some facts regarding the success of Yahoo's home-grown social bookmarks service:

In practice, however, tagging search results and bookmarks may still be too geeky an activity for Yahoo's average Joe. Thus far, My Web has seen tepid growth in the number of pages saved (about 300,000) and tags applied (fewer than 90,000). That might not seem bad for a product still in beta, but My Web is seeing little month-to-month growth. (Del.icio.us, by contrast, has 10 million saved pages and half a million tags.)

Why are mainstream users slow to adapt tagging? Is it because it is inherently attractive only for a small segment, or is it just a matter of time before one of the competing social bookmarking services will get the ingredients + the secret sauce of the tagging user experience right?

Technorati : ErickSchonfeld, EstherDyson, delicious, flickr, mainstream, my web, social media, tagging, yahoo
Del.icio.us : ErickSchonfeld, EstherDyson, delicious, flickr, mainstream, my web, social media, tagging, yahoo

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 :)

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

Standartizing Tag Semantics

striatic has been leading for several months a brave attempt on the Flickr discussion board to standardize the usage of certain tags.

Several similar discussions went on in the del.icio.us discussion list. Suggestions for a wiki-like solution to organize such an effort keep coming up.

There are some things that tagging systems could do to reduce the effort associated with this, without losing the value of free-form, tag-with-whatever-comes-to-mind tagging.

Some of them can be done in the backend, when searching for tags (like stemming). However, there are probably more things that such systems can do to encourage users to choose the more standard tags.

For example, using the same logic used by the Flickr clustering algorithm, when a user tags an item with "SF", the system could - after letting me use the SF tag - make a suggestion:

The "SF" tag often stands for "San Francisco". The "SF" tag was used 36,717 times, while the "San Francisco" tag was used 214,347 times. Would you like to add the "San Francisco" tag as well?

As more and more users join the tagging circles, thought should be given to the scalability of the model - it is in everyone's best interest to reduce the number of tags in the tag space. Well. Except maybe for Oracle and MySQL :)

Technorati : delicious, flickr, semantic, standard, striatic, tag, tagging
Del.icio.us : delicious, flickr, semantic, standard, striatic, tag, tagging

Big.Blue.Licious

David Weinberger live-blogged a rather amusing recount of an IBM press event, "The Future of Social Networks" held in the IBM office in Cambridge.

Turns out that IBM did their own application wiki thingie (JotSpot-like), and also - behold - DogEar, an internal social bookmarking service.

My favorite quote:

"Irene: It's all Web 2.0 stuff." :)

An interesting read, especially given the live-blogging effect (less-filtered opinions).

Technorati : DavidWeinberger, DogEar, IBM, JotSpot, app, appliki, delicious, folksonomy, tag, tagging, wiki
Del.icio.us : DavidWeinberger, DogEar, IBM, JotSpot, app, appliki, delicious, folksonomy, tag, tagging, wiki

The Perfect Tagging UI

Enough whining. I'm going to try to be constructive by listing what are the behaviors that will make me fall in love with a tagging thingie:

1. Clearly mark the tag boundaries
   
   • Why? we still have a mess with different conventions regarding what separates tags - spaces, commas, semicolon, ... until we figure out it, we need a way to provide a visual hint to the user whether they got it right or wrong.
   • Reasonable: Flock. Tags are comma-separated; whenever you type the comma, the previous tag is visually surrounded by a gray bubble indicating that it's a "single unit".
     
   • Bad but not awful: Flickr. You can't tell as you type the tags if you got it right or wrong, but when you click the "Add" button, you get immediate visual feedback by inspecting the tags list above the entry line.
   • Terrible: Zoundry (which other then this is a pretty cool product, I am using it to write this post :). You won't know if you did it right or wrong until you see your post
     on the blog...


2. Support copy and paste of tags
   
   • there, and paste them here. Using a standard copy-and-paste interface, mind you.
   • list, but selecting the tags in the list is hard, and pasting them results in a mess.
   • Good: delicious.


3. Auto-complete
   
   • Why? I love tagging, they make life easier. I don't like typing, it makes life shorter.
   • Reasonable: blinklist.
   • Bad: RawSugar. The auto-suggest does not follow well with the typing process. I can't press enter to choose the currently selected auto-complete suggestion and then proceed to type the next tag. I am forced to leave my typing context to select the tag, and after it's selected, to use the mouse to move back to where I was in the tagging line.
     
   
   
4. Auto-suggest
   
   • Why? I'm not always in the mood to generate tags. Sometimes I am feeling lazy. Comeon, you know so much about me and about other users, use it to make my life easier, not just the search engine life :)
     
     • Based on tags that I've often used together with the tags I've already typed
     • Based on tags that other users often use together with the tags I've already typed
     • Based on tags that other people who tagged this page used
       
   • Good: delicious
   • Bad: Flickr


5. No hierarchy, classification, or anything else that disrupts the cognitive process
   
   • Why? Because I find it distracting. And I have a good excuse for this :)
   • Good: Flickr
   • Bad: RawSugar
     


6. Ability to edit tags like text
   
   • Why? because I make typos and change my mind, and I want to be able to quickly go back during the tagging process (or later) and fix it
     
   • Good: Flickr, Delicious. Though none of them makes it too easy to edit the tags once they are submitted.
     
   • Bad: Flock. The visual bubble around the tags, which I mention in #1, really gets in the way when you see a typo in a tag you just typed and you want to fix it.
     


7. Search previously tagged items with an already-typed tag without disrupting the tagging process
   
   • Why? Because I'd like to borrow the tags I used when I tagged related items in the past
   • Good: Flickr. Modless tagging interface, I can always open a new window and search.
   • Bad: Flock (modal dialog...), Microsoft Live Favorites.
     

Funny, if you scan the "Bad:" examples, you'll note that the application that I am pretty much addicted to - Flickr - scores pretty high on the Bad list. Which kinda puts my rumbling in perspective :)

Technorati : Zoundry, delicious,favorites, flickr, flock,folksonomy, microsoft live,rawsugar, tag,tagging, web2.0
Del.icio.us : Zoundry, delicious,favorites, flickr, flock,folksonomy, microsoft live, rawsugar,tag, tagging, web2.0

Toward a tagging standard

How come we still don't have a standard for associating tags with content?

We've got delicious and friends tagging entire web pages, and Technorati tagging blog posts. Flickr tags pictures. But how different are they really from each other in this aspect? Do we really need a propriety way to express the association of a piece of content with tags?

How's about something along the following lines:

Tag a piece of content:

<tagstd:tagged tagstd:scope="children" xmlns:tagstd="http://tagstd.org">
<taglist xmlns="http://tagstd.org">
<tag>tagging</tag>
<tag>folksonomy</tag>
</taglist>
<p>This is a long blurb about our favorite topics:</p>
<ul><li>tagging</li><li>taxonomy</li><li>web 2.0</li></ul>
</tagstd:tagged>

(scope="children" indicates that the tagged content is the children element of the tagged tag).

Tag a link (in fact, tag the resource that the link is pointing to):

<tagstd:tagged tagstd:scope="resource" xmlns:tagstd="http://tagstd.org">
<taglist xmlns="http://tagstd.org">
<tag>tagging</tag>
<tag>folksonomy</tag>
</taglist>
<a href="http://www.hyperorg.com/">Joho the Blog</a>
</tagstd:tagged>

(scope="resource" indicates that the tagged content is the resouce expressed by the first non-comment element, which is a child of the tagged element.

What do you think? Good? Bad? Reinventing the wheel?

Let me know.

Technorati : blogger, delicious, flickr, folksonomy, html, standard, tag, tagging, tagstd.org, xhtml, xml
Del.icio.us : blogger, delicious, flickr, folksonomy, html, standard, tag, tagging, tagstd.org, xhtml, xml

Post activation analysis paralysis

Scott Golder wrote (together with Bernardo A. Huberman) a while back a paper on "The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems" (which I mentioned a while back).

Scott published his notes from Rashmi Sinha's session at TagCamp 2005 a few days ago. Rashmi Sinha, from Uzanto Consulting, posted about a month ago a wonderful piece on "A cognitive analysis of tagging". It's a must read.

Her main point is that the tagging process is so much more easy and natural then the classification process (e.g. organizing URLs or Pictures or whatever into hierarchies or folders based on a predefined categories), because it avoids what she calls "post-activation analysis paralysis":

"post activation analysis paralysis": A state of fear that you will make the wrong decision. And the item will be lost forever - it will land in some deep well, some hard to access branch of the tree and disappear from your view and attention.

Her analysis makes a lot of sense. If this is true, I think it's a good argument in favor of keeping the tagging process as simple as possible, and not to encumber it with facets, hierarchical tagging or anything else that makes that will pause that sub-conscious stream of tags from flowing. Hopefully we can avoid over-engineering the tagging process for a while, focusing instead on perfecting (and standardizing) the usability of the core tagging process.


Tags: tags tagging folksonomy web2.0 delicious search cognitive RashmiSinha hierarchy
facet classification

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