A Blog About Making Culture
Everyone Must Have Tags!
November 13, 2005
Looks like Amazon's in the midst of a rollout of tags on product pages. It's not the first dabbling Amazon's done in the technology, of course, since they were one of the backers of Robot Co-op, whose apps like 43Things are all about the tagging.
Being able to tag arbitrary nodes in Amazon is interesting, as you can see from example pages on the site. (Not everyone will be able to view that link until the test is rolled out to all users.) Thanks to Amazon/Web Services whiz Alan Taylor for the heads-up about the feature.
And while I'm sure there' s a number of practical applications for tagging on Amazon's site, the first thing that occurs to me is that I want a new Web 2.0 To-Do list application. Instead of creating your own checklist of items to be completed, the list consists of a few bullets such as:
- Tags
- Blue Gradient
- Yellow Fade
- Feeds for Everything
- Ruby on Rails
- Ajax
- REST API
- Google Maps Mashup
And then you can check items off of the list as you roll them out on your site. No need to bother with pesky features like being able to add or remove items on the list, you just keep going until they're all checked off, and then you're ready to flip!
Previously: Think about the children!
brilliantdays.com
Amazon adds tagging to books: Richard MacManus reports that Amazon.com has put an option to tag books for half of it's US customers. Tagging a book works like this: You enter keywords for a book on the book's page, and people can then search for... read more »Paul Watson
Finally, my mom will be introduced to tagging.
David Jacobs
Don’t forget “Get crushed my Google, Apple or Yahoo before you even get out of beta.”
David Parmet
There’s a drinking game there somewhere.
brian w
I’m all for the Web 2.0 jokes, but I do wish Amazon would embrace a little AJAX action on their Wishlist pages—I moved around 400 items last night and was in pain the entire time with all the endless reloading.
Anil Dash 
Yeah, wishlists in general need some love; They really seem to not have aged very well. On the other hand, testing any changes to functionality (let alone UI!) for a featured used to generate millions of sales transactions, right before the holiday gift season, would be a terrifying thing to contemplate.
Anil Dash
Yeah, wishlists in general need some love; They really seem to not have aged very well. On the other hand, testing any changes to functionality (let alone UI!) for a featured used to generate millions of sales transactions, right before the holiday gift season, would be a terrifying thing to contemplate.
Tom
The example link is 404ing, I’m from the UK. Do you think that makes any odds?
Julie Chadwick
Forget the tags — the web 2.0 checklist is the real news here. :-)
William
Short list of companies that have not innovated and that will pay a dear price for it.
1.Ebay 2.Amazon 3.AOL 4.Microsoft 5.Yahoo 6.Craigslist
Most of these companies are beginning to innovate now, but I believe that google has an insurmountable lead. One thing to notice is that all of these companies lost innovation when they became large slow reacting companies that can no longer innovate. I think that if you are in the position of reacting you have already lost the race. All of the companies on my list at one time had large leads in their market as far as innovation. Because the internet is evolutionary and revolutionary we can expect that those that are currently in the lead will certainly be passed.
Simonjp
William, surely saying that Yahoo hasn’t innovated is a bit strong? OK, much of their work is based on purchased innovators rather than home-grown talent, but the same accusation could be leveled at Google (Keyhole, for example). Flickr is the 2.0 service, and it’s a Yahoo stablemate. Google might have the pretty Gmail, but it doesn’t have a ‘social search’ system in the open sphere yet - contrast that with Yahoo’s MyWeb2.
Oyvind
William, do you think Amazon has not innovated? I disagree. They improve their shop every week, and make all others pale in comparison.
Jeremy
I’ve been consistently under impressed with Amazon innovations. Maybe there’s just not that many really revolutionary things you can do with ecommerce but I find these things difficult to get excited about.
Shrikant Joshi
Web 2.0, huh? Sometime I wonder whether this is the beginning of a bubble or a face-lift. I wish it is the first. I hope it is the second. Crazy world. No idea where it is heading to… Too many focii. Too less decisions… Somebody answer me. How can you have personalized spaces and work collectively at the same time?
mohit
1: tag me? you want to tag me?
2: yes.
1: tag me?
2: tag everybody. the people who you work for, i will want to tag them too. tag everybody!
Easton Ellsworth
You can’t judge a book by its cover, but now you can judge it by its tags. (Right, Amazon?)
I wonder if we won’t all be suffering from tag overload in a few years when we all have tags stuck all over every aspect of our public and private lives. Imagine all the Web content you’ve ever created, sliced and diced in every way imaginable. I just hope that this comment doesn’t get tagged “silly” by thousands of people someday.
dumbfounder
Where has Google been innovating? Certainly not in their websearch, which has seen very little innovation. GMail? I will definitely give you that one. very innovative. Google Earth? they bought that. Google analytics? ditto. Orkut? looks like friendster to me, which they tried to buy. Froogle? they do it well, but it’s not innovation, that concept has been around for a while. Google blog search? it is TERRIBLE. Google images? um, if that’s innovation I have a very innovative bridge to sell you. Google Talk? can you say Skype? Google book search? Amazon was doing it before them.
Post a comment