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Interview with Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us
prostoalex writes "Joshua Schachter, a Wall Street programmer by day, and a del.icio.us hacker by night, is interviewed by Guardian. The article also provides a little background story on del.icio.us, how it got started, and how Schachter convinced Stewart Butterfield of Flickr to add tagging to the photo sharing site. Both del.icio.us and Flickr are currently members of the Yahoo! family."
I was about to say the same about /.
The benefits of tagging for a company like Yahoo come from the ability to use the tagging to derive the meaning of a page. Tagging will help Yahoo refine Yahoo search results and also suggest similar sites. The problem with it is that it's really got to be protected from abuse, or like meta keywords in the page, it'll be abused to the point where it's not reliable for anything, and will be largely ignored.
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You missed something.
The site is incredibly useful--think of it as a searchable collection of human-filtered and categorized web sites. I often use it when search results from Google and other search engines aren't quite giving me what I'm looking for.
Ah, so, exactly what Yahoo used to be. Ironic, isn't it.
Has anybody invented a name yet, for the "web 2.0" types of people who are obsessed with every new silly fad, like blogs, flicker, delicious, myspace, etc.? There's a whole lot of those (you) people out there, and I just don't get it. Not only are there a lot of people into this stuff, but some are even militant about it, from what I can tell (ie: Don't make fun of blogging! It's better than journalism)
I've been online since the BBS days, and I've kept up with all of the new changes, ideas (hell, protocols, even), but this "social" stuff seems (to me) to be nothing more than personal narcicism, magnified millions of times over, combined with a desperate, almost pathteic need to connect with other personalities in order to fill a massive void in their own personal lives combined with a total lack of any kind of academic discipline (it seems that more than half of the people who write online are functionally illiterate). Is it just me? Am I the last one alive with his own brain after the Body Snatchers came through?
Anybody have any insight, or even a good suggested name for these people?
I don't respond to AC's.
What I find fascinating is even with 13 million dollars of investment and lots of publicity and technical know how behind it, del.icio.us succeeded and blink.com failed pretty much because of one simple thing, it used tags instead of folders. This reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell's (The Tipping Point) observation that the difference between being accepted or not can often rest on a very narrow detail.
It can't be understated how much easier it is organizing stuff using tags, the folders within folders practice is useful for some types of data, but it becomes quite unwieldly quickly for things like photos and bookmarks.
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Ah yes, the days of the BBS. For you younger people who might have heard of the internet bubble, the BBS was sorta what was before. It was an internet where you had to dial in to a website rather then all the websites being together on one big net. Oh it was more complex then that but I don't want to give you nightmares.
One thing however that was the same was that I saw countless articles and tv shows about how companies needed a BBS to stay in business. Just like every company needed a website. Or a fax.
It really isn't that complex, any new tech needs to be sold so marketting comes up with reasons and sales people tell them to managers and managers lap it up. Or something.
This "social" thing ain't new. It just used to be your personal homespace on geocities but that failed so now it is your blog on myspace because that is better.
Just like BBS sorta changed to websites, personal homepages changed to blogs. And just like some people have always shared their bookmarks this site is just a bit like it.
Will it chance things? Well is slashdot a "social" way to share your links to intresting sites?
It just doesn't sell headlines when you tell the truth and go "sorta new site does something that someone else already does but does it slightly better according to some but with half the uptime".
Doesn't fit and people get bored. Better to claim the revolution is here! (Down nintendo fans)
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Isn't it like the most obvious idea? How else would you categorise any kind of data? And it's also obvious that information can belong to several categories at the same time. Hasn't this been going on since even before the invention of computers (libraries labeling their collection etc.)?
So the delicious guy became popular with it, but I don't think that's because he invented "tagging". Not that it matters, but the hyping tone of the article just annoyed me.
Besides, I am curious if del.icio.us will really be usueful one day. A tag like "funny" isn't going to help much in the long run... Also, there were other bookmark collecting web pages before. The unsovled problem of the whole idea is the privacy issues. But I learn from that example that it might not be worth worrying about that anyway.
Or because imageshack is a free host for pr0n ;-)
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That so exquisitely and precisely misses the point (Yahoo's destined-to-failure top-down hierarchy and the self-directed utility of tagging) that it should be bronzed. Yahoo used to be that when the web was small, tagging makes that when the web gets larger. Tags get better with scale, Yahoo got worse. That's the whole POINT of all these little pieces of informal metadata.