Tom Coates hypothesizes how tag-based bookmarking would work in web browsers. Ultimately this thought experiment shows that browsers shouldn't have bookmarking at all.
Tags are:
- Lightweight. Unlike explicitly creating a new category, say, you enter a new tag. While the software is basically creating a new category for you, the system value of one tag is less than one category. Instead of requiring you to select a tag from a list--who cares if you make a new one up?--del.icio.us asks you freeform with the same by-the-way list of your previously used tags in the sidebar, so you can keep using the same tags if that's appropriate. Or not. Whatever.
- Loosely associated with each other. Far from being orthogonal or (heaven forfend) hierarchical, tags are completely unrelated from each other. Thus they're more portable across people than what you'd expect if Flickr called them "categories." While you can infer associations between tags based on frequency of their association in particular cases (why no pretty renders of tag graphs yet?), there's no extrinsic association for the user to worry his pretty little head about.
- Social. Tom writes that tags "becom[e] infinitely more useful when they're aggregated" across people, but I would go as far to say that, without aggregation, tags are just keywords.
- Heavily hyped. It sounds like Tom has done enough work with related concepts (his "folksonomies" link doesn't work for me right now) that he sees truth in it, but, as far as the folk wisdom in weblogland goes, they're taxonomic Atkins. (I don't mean that favorably.) While they have the affordances I called out above, everyone thinks they're the next big thing because the gloss hasn't worn off yet.
It could be that tags are the next big thing, but I reserve judgment.
Flickr and del.icio.us use tagging and browsers don't yet because it's easier to implement something in a web site than in client software. Having to get people to download and install an application has kept the brisk sweep of the tag idea in the realm of web apps. It's kicking up the top soil, but the clay underneath is staying put. Tom's discussion is mainly about what will happen to web browsers (mainly Safari) when the tag concept finally digs in that deep.
It looks like a del.icio.us client app built right in, which makes sense as del.icio.us is tagged bookmarks. While there's an extension that "integrates del.icio.us with Firefox," it's from the posting side, not the viewing side as Tom's Safari mock-ups show. While they're widely derided as half-baked, Firefox's Live Bookmarks are the other half of that if you set them up with del.icio.us feeds (from what I hear--I haven't used 1.0 PR myself).
In this way, while I wouldn't have included Live Bookmarks in core Firefox without 0.1 versions of real use, Live Bookmarks and their harmony with del.icio.us are a step in the right direction. First, they show experimentally that bookmarks as they currently exist don't work for a lot of people. The main utility, however, is showing bookmarks as they currently exist are an add-on feature that isn't intrinsic to the browsing activity. The diversity of bookmark methods and tools show that we're rethinking what bookmarking is. One might argue the linking aspects of blogging are, as an activity, bookmarking, especially as so many bloggers outsource their linklogs to del.icio.us. Why not open bookmarks up to the rapid development cycle of web apps, by pushing it out of the browser and into a more dynamic space?
I'm sure some people would rather lose View Source than bookmarks as they exist now, and after that tempest in a teapot Firefox won't change the "body plan" of the browser in such a dramatic fashion. Regardless, moving not only Live Bookmarks but bookmarks bookmarks from the core browser to an extension would open up a niche in which to grow some new tools.
Comments
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That was really interesting, Mark - I’m always interested to see how other people use bookmarks (and how they invision them used in teh fututre) because I haven’t felt that I’m an efficiant bookmarker for a while now. That was kinda my initial goal in having a link blog, so I had a live way to categorize my links, and not just that, but have a date context with them too. Which works really well until I get lazy and busy and just drag them to my bookmarks folder anyhow. LOL!
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While there’s an extension that “integrates del.icio.us with Firefox,” it’s from the posting side, not the viewing side
Actually, with the plugin installed, go to View -> Sidebar -> del.icio.us to see a viewing side of things. Personally, I don’t find it useful, but it’s a first crack at making a remote viewer out of it.
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Ah, that’s pretty neat! That it’s only your bookmarks does make it less useful than if it showed others’ too somehow, at least from my arguments above. They might try something more like Tom’s interface.
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Mark: good points made here. I think tags are the future, because of the first reason: they’re lightweight. Maybe there was a time when people could be trusted to go hog-wild on a text field, and they wanted discrete category choices presented in a menu. Now that people are savvy with things like punching numbers on a telephone keypad and typing in URLs in a web browser, the threshold has been lowered for what kind of techno-loj-ickle hoops people are willing to jump through.
One thing that keeps del.icio.us from thoroughly pillaging the in-browser bookmarks scene, for me at least: privacy. To wit: I have lots of bookmarks to pages that I don’t want people to know I’m tracking (like the page where I crib all my MT hacks ;-). del.icio.us needs a “private” flag. social is good but I don’t want everything to be shared. Flickr allows you to hide some photos from all but your inner sanctum. Why not del.icio.us?
Oh, as a testament to the power of collaborative bookmarking: I got here from the del.icio.us front page.
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Tagging has a bunch of problems. First, it’s not structured enough. If twenty people see a funny site, I bet they’ll all tag it different ways (humor, humour, funny, laugh, chuckle, giggle, chortle, fun, amusing, amusement, humorous, amuse, and lol are some that come to mind). This completely removes the usefulness of the collaborative aspect.
Also, del.icio.us needs to get rid of dupes if you’re browsing by tag; if three hundred people have posted a website to any given tag, you’ll see it three hundred times.
Oh, and we need private tags. I’d rather not put up a list of every website I’m planning to read at some future date for everyone to brows, or the list of websites I use for my subversive activities, or what ever. As well, a tag like “cool” is completely useless in a collaborative context. I’m sure you and I have completely different ideas about what is and is not “cool”.
Also, what about tag spammers? What is/will be done about this? If it isn’t a problem now, when del.icio.us becomes popular it will be.
All of the above things combined make features like the inbox useless. The only thing I use del.icio.us for is random link trolling on the front page (and over ninety percent of the links I find have been incorrectly tagged for public consumption…people simpley do not understand that “funny” and “cool” and “interesting” are not objective terms, I even have this problem with the open directory project) and a way to organize my own links so I have them across all the machines I use.
Cool things could be done with delicious (find users similar to you who tag many of the links you do under many of the tags you use and recommend other links this user has that you don’t, make tag browsing sort the sites shown from most popular to least within each tag, make a delicious similar sites engine, etc) but I haven’t seen any of that yet. It’s the nicest online bookmark manager I’ve seen, though.
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Any alert programmer could clone del.icio.us in a day, and could add private tags in an hour or two. I would hazard that the lack of private tags is an intentional choice for del.icio.us to not be hosted bookmarks but social bookmarks.
I find the inbox useful, but I haven’t added tags to it, only users.
So ignore those tags.