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Labels Not Tags, Says Google

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the a-tag-by-any-other-name dept.

Ashraf Al Shafaki writes "The word 'tags' is the one in common use on the Web today and is one of the distinctive features of Web 2.0. Ever since Gmail came out, Google has decided to use the term 'label' instead of the term 'tag' despite they are basically the exact same thing and have the exact same function. Why is Google using inconsistent terminology in its products for such an important term? Is there a real difference between a tag and a label?"

3 of 284 comments (clear)

  1. Re:A replacement for "folder" by kusanagi374 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yeah, pretty much like the Motorola phones. When you create a folder on a MicroSD card (photos, videos, music, etc) it'll consider the folder name a "category", and the whole UI is based on that concept.

    I believe its much more logical to consider folders as categories and subcategories instead of just directories. That's what I do when I store my data, and that's the logic behind my folder names.

  2. Desktop email clients use term labels by grag · · Score: 5, Informative

    Eudora and Thunderbird use the term labels. MS Entourage and MS Outlook use the term categories. By the way, is there some standards document like RFC saying any web app, especially webmail, has to use the term tags?

  3. Re:Why tags? by mporcheron · · Score: 3, Informative

    actually, Google Reader only refers to them as tags on the Settings page, on the rest of the site they're called folders