Simpy Chichimichi

Tagging as we know it started with link tagging, followed by photo tagging, and quickly took off. Since then, the world has been going crazy and drooling over tagging, folksonomies, and social software and services.

Some thought or still seem to think that you can just slap tags to any type of information and any type of software, and all of a sudden they would become oh so much better. Thus, we now have dating services with tags, video with tags, audio with tags, and so on. Some of these services are a success, and their use of tags makes them more useful.

Tags are indeed a nice "innovation" - they lend themselves to easy input, easy (re)organization, they (can) improve information discovery and navigation, can be employed as filters and thus help with information overload (note how this conflicts somewhat with information discovery aspect of tags).

However, tags are not a panacea! Just because you can make something taggable, it does not automatically mean it makes sense to do so, and it does not magically increase its usefulness.

Take, for instance, Tagzania, described on the site as "Tagzania is about tags and places. If you register and log in, you can add places, points, to create and document your maps. When you add a point, you may tag it with keywords. That way, Tagzania is not only a place to build and keep your own maps, shared territories are created as well.". The service was started in July 2005 and people blogged about it like mad! But where is Tagzania now, a month after its launch? According to Alexa, it's nowhere.

How come? Tagging places makes sense, doesn't it? Hm, does it? For whom? Yourself or others? Remember, while tags are simple and easily applied, they still require time and effort. Most people are selfish (I try to be realistic). Now ask yourself: How often do I need to tag a place I know? How often in my daily life do I encounter a new place? For most of us, the answer will be not often. How often then will I go to Tagzania to tag a new place? Rarely. If I don't use Tagzania very often, will I remember to visit it when I visit a new place? No, not me. If you know of only a few dozen places, do you really need to tag them? I don't. I can remember them all and can look them up by name.

When considering adding tagging to your service or application, ask yourself some of the above questions. Tags don't always make sense.

I've always disliked hierarchies as a navigation mechanism for large information corpora. When I first started to write software that powers Simpy, back in 2002, I asked myself some of these questions and came up with answers that had "tagging" written all over them, and judging from Simpy users' feedback, they've worked out very well!