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Imagine you have a closet where you store all your documents. Each time you want to archive an important document you tell your closet: “put that under important”, a magic hand, coming out of the closet, takes your document and puts it into its immense pile of documents. The other day you are in a hurry to be on time to your next meeting. You need that important document from yesterday so you ask your closet: “please show me all important documents”. Then you hear printing and rustling in the closet until, after half a minute, 20 magic hands stick out of your closet, each one holding a document, some of your documents have sticky notes on it saying: “this is not filed “important” but it is similar to a document you filed important”, another sticky note says: “these are all the other categories you put your documents in” and every document you really filed “important” has got a sticky note on the number of coworker who filed this document under “important”. You say to your self: Tomorrow I’ll reanimate my pile “important documents” that was on my desktop before they put this silly closet into my office.
That’s the feeling that arises when I think of all the bookmark services out there that ought to file urls I somehow find notworthy so that I can quickly recall them afterwards: There’s too much clutter and the services are just too slow. Therefore I again begin to save my bookmarks at other places: In firefox or in some text documents lying somewhere on my hard drive (probably I should tag them?).
As for myself, if I don’t get my data within a fraction of a second, I don’t feel that I have good access to my data. I think one of the best things of Google Web search is that it is incredible fast. Tag services are not. That’s a pity because within tag services I search my lowly amount of bookmarks (around 2000 bookmarks at that moment) whereas with Google I search the whole net. I often find myself at the situation searching for a url on Google rather than looking it up on my bookmark service. Even if I have to do 3 Google searches – I feel at control. If I have to wait for 3 seconds for an answer, that’s simply too much.
An experiment: I ran for ((i=0;i<10;i++)) do wget -q --user-agent="Mozille Firefox 1.9" $url; done; for the three big players in tagging services: del.icio.us, Simpy and Rawsugar. For $url I chose a page displaying all bookmarks saved with a certain tag. I also ran a query on Google for that “tag”. The numbers are number of seconds per query. The queries were run on different hosts with different internet connection, all in Switzerland.
| service | Sun 18:00 CET | Mon 18:50 CET | Tue 09:00 CET | Tue 12:40 CET | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Delicious | 2.1s | 2.3s | 2.6s | 2.4s | 2.4s |
| Simpy | 3s | 6s | 2.7s | 3.3s | 3.8s |
| Rawsugar | 1s | 1.5s | 1s | 1.1s | 1.2s |
| 0.2s | 0.5s | 0.3s | 0.3s | 0.3s |
I’m happy to see that with Rawsugar I’m with the fastest bookmark service (2 times faster than Delicious, 3 times faster than Simpy). On the other hand: all the bookmark services are at least 4 times slower than Google. I know that Google has set a high mark – but emotionally that’s the response time I’d like to have when querying for my data.
Have a look at the “result areas” (highlighted in green) of the three bookmark services.
To come back to the comparison with the closet: Even if there are 20 magic hands with documents sticking out of the closet, it is crucial that the most important document is the one closest to my face. That means, when using those bookmark services, my eye should first notice the most important link. My opinion: The service that solves this best is Delicious. The results appear on the leftmost part of my screen and the result area covers 64% of the screen. Regarding that matter Rawsugar is far worse: My eye has to search for the first result. I find it natural to start reading at the left of the screen. But at Rawsugar there are so many links in the head of the page and then the left column helps me to refine the result – a great feature but at the wrong place – furthermore: if I want just get a link I know I filed under “important”, I don’t need this at all. Even Delicious’ “saved by xxx other people” – shaped in different colorings – is too much clutter for me. Maybe I’m a puritan but – what the heck – I just want my 9 bookmarks!
| service | result area ratio |
|---|---|
| Delicious | 63.6% |
| Simpy | 60.2% |
| Rawsugar | 51.2% |
Sorry to only criticize. I like those services a lot. They are helping organizing links and they are for free. To turn this post into a constructive comment, two possible solutions to the problems mentioned.
Yes, tagging is about collaboration. But I fear the personal value of tagging is too small – people might leave tagging services because they don’t feel their bookmark problem solved. There’s too much network and too many features. I propose a “minimal mode”, a result page that just shows select * from bookmarks where user="phred" and one_of_its_tags="important". In firefox there are Smart Keywords also known as “quick search”. I set up “myr” to search for my rawsugar bookmarks. Typing “myr important” into my location bar I end up on www.rawsugar.com/links/phred/important. If there would be a site on rawsugar that displays the same results just in this minimal mode, I would bend my smart keyword to this result page and would be happy.
I imagine a “tag agent” that has incredible response time and no clutter. It could either get the results via rss/api from the bookmark service or it could hold all my tagged bookmarks in it’s own database. Such an agent could be installed on a password-protected part of my website so I can access it from wherever I am. The problem is: I don’t have time to write an application my own. I have thought about such an application, I’ve got plenty of ideas how it should look but I’m afraid I won’t find time to code such an application. I repeatedly get emails from people writing yet another thesis on collaborative categorisation. Instead of writing about insights on the mental actions taking place while tagging – do the tagging world a favour and write such an agent. If there’s such a tag agent already, please leave a comment.