Paolo Valdemarin:

4 years later I’m still wondering when will we get some truly advanced tagging tools.
Where are all these tools to manage all my tags (on Flickr, on del.icio.us, on technorati, in my RSS reader, on my blog, etc), to help me organizing them, to allow me to gain more advantages from tagging? (maybe they are somewhere and I simply have not found them yet…)

Matt Mower:

I have been surprised, that [...] the state of the art in tagging seems firmly wedged in 2003. Surprised because there seemed [...] to be a momentum building in the use of tagging

David Weinberger:

Tagging like it was 2002

Thomas Vander Wal:

In the consumer space thing have been stagnant for a while, but in the enterprise space there is some good forward movement and some innovation taking place
[...]
While there are examples that tagging services have moved forward, there is so much more room to advance and improve. As people’s own collection of tagged pages and objects have grown the tools are needed to better refind them.

Vander Wals post is very very insightful and worth a read: He sums up the tagging history and expresses a few brilliant ideas how to proceed.

The delicious lesson – revisited

The big question remains: Why is tagging stuck?

My suggestion is that we may rethink the delicious lesson: Not in terms of “is it true that personal value precedes network value?” but in terms of “what is the real benefit of the users?” or in other words: “How can we design the itch that causes users to generate valuable metadata?”

Recently I talked with Cédric Huesler, a coworker of mine about his use of del.icio.us: Instead of using delicious for storing his bookmarks for later retrieval he stores them to exchange links with strangers. Indeed he has 19 regular consumers of his bookmarks, 7 of these users he is consumer as well.

He doesn’t store his personal bookmarks at all. He can recall from memory where or how he found a certain website and goes back to his google history.

There are just a few entry points into new information on the web: there is Google, feed aggregators or frontpage sites. When there are good search utilities in those tools who needs bookmarks? I must confess that searching at those entry points feels more natural to me than remembering the exact tag I used.

Let’s put it straight: Using tags to find my bookmarks later just doesn’t work. I give up. And no, it’s not just the lack of good tools that help me going through my bookmarks to reorganize them. I won’t do that for all my 3444 bookmarks. And no, this won’t be solved with better tools to refind my items. What do you want to throw into the mix? Fulltext search and time based drill-down? This has nothing to do with tags.

So, we might have to rephrase the users motivation to tag, as I don’t think Joshua Porter was right when he wrote:

in order to gain more personal value, they use tags to be able to find their bookmarks later

I’m not yet at the point where I could correctly rephrase that statement, but I think Cédrics approach in using tags not for personal recall but for publishing is worth a thought. The value therein is close to the value of blogging: You get attention and you communicate. And that’s what the web is about, isn’t it?

History of tags

Update September, 2007: Thomas Vander Wal wrote a very good roundup on the tag history.

Gartners hype cycles applied to tag history

I think gartners hype cycles prove to be right when applied to the tag history (hype cycle descriptions taken from Floor eTrends):

Technology trigger

A breakthrough, public demonstration, product launch or other event that generates significant
press and industry interest.

The technology trigger most likely was del.icio.us and subsequently flickr adding tagging to their service.

Peak of inflated expectations

A phase of overenthusiasm and unrealistic projections during which a flurry of publicized
activity by technology leaders results in some successes but more failures as the technology is
pushed to its limits. The only enterprises making money at this stage are conference organizers
and magazine publishers.

In this phase there were indeed many blog posts talking about this subject, as Louis Rosenfeld
put it:

Lately, you can’t surf information architecture blogs for five minutes without stumbling on a
discussion of folksonomies

I guess in this phase many people said things they now feel embarassed about.

Trough of disillusionment

The point at which the technology becomes unfashionable and the press abandons the
topic, because the technology did not live up to its overinflated expectations.

This is the phase we’re in now. There are no blog posts any more. Tagging is not really
unfashionable but the topic is “done” à la «if that’s all what’s tagging adds to the web experience, I’m not interested in this technology any more». There isn’t much thinking and innovation going on.

Slope of enlightenment

Focused experimentation and solid hard work by an increasingly diverse range of organizations
lead to a true understanding of the technology’s applicability, risks and benefits. Commercial
off-the-shelf methodologies and tools become available to ease the development process.

Let’s hope gartner is right about the future of folksonomies!

Plateau of productivity

The real-world benefits of the technology are demonstrated and accepted. Tools and
methodologies are increasingly stable as they enter their second and third generation. The final
height of the plateau varies according to whether the technology is broadly applicable or only
benefits a niche market.

It has yet to show if folksonomies such as in del.icio.us or flickr prove themselves for the masses.

Update (September, 2007): Do folksonomies apply to hype cycles at all?

Joe Lamantia raises the question if tagging should be applied at all to Gartners Hype Cycles:

Tagging in fact shows few characteristics of the enterprise technologies that Gartner’s Hype Cycle is built around

Joe argues rightly, that tagging has not yet reached the broad economy, it’s not that Gartner would care to apply folksonomies to their Hype Cycles.

Although: Gartner apply the hype cycle to technologies such as “corporate blogging” or wikis. It seems it does not lie in the nature of tagging that it won’t ever apply to hype cycles, the only fact that hinders Gartner to apply tagging to their hype cycles is that there is no money earned with it. I’m not into business analysis at all so I am grateful for Joes insights which he concludes with:

If it doesn’t cost money, the perceived risks of the technology are lower, and the big analysis firms pay less attention, because their customers see less need to pay for analysis