Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Tagging people - a bit too far?


You can now tag yourself, or people you know, in Tagalag, a social networking, community building, tribing site. I find it hard even to summarize myself with a few paragraphs, not to mention tagging with a few words. Is it really necessary? Although pretty cool concept, I think this is one of the trash ideas that will never fly.

The purpose of tagging is to manage non-text objects, which are very hard for search engines to work with, but on the other hand extremely simple objects that can be precisely described with a few words, tags. The ability of search is thus powerfully enhanced. Complex objects like human are difficult to tag, and doing so brings no additional benefit than describing the object with a few paragraphs of text, which search engines can equally relate to.

One thing to note is that social networking seems to have just started a serious face-lift! I will try to keep this list growing:
Let's keep our eyes open.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous1:14 AM

    Simpy is a bit older. Social bookmarking, tagging, notes, topics, topic filters, full-text search, groups, and other goodness.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for pointing out Simpy! It's pretty cool, but the interface is not as nice as other Web 2.0 sites.

    ReplyDelete