Technology As Innovator

Facebook

73.5 million users and growing fastest

What I like about it

1. Mini-Feed is useful in seeing a quick snapshot on the latest happenings within your network without going to several sites to check.
2. The ability to supply how you know a person.
3. Nice applications. Approximately 10% of Facebook applications I’ve tried are interesting and useful while others are not as good.

I think these can be improved

1. Fixed 600 width and non-resizable
2. Non-customizable design
3. No built-in blogging functionality. Blogging can be done with applications such as Live Blog, but we don’t normally depend on addons for such important values like blogs.
4. Tight security: profile only viewable by friends. How do you determine if a profile is your friend or not just by looking at the screen name which can be different from the real name?
5. One account can only join no more than 200 groups. Unlimited is preferred.

Orkut

24.6 million users

What I like about it

1. Simple design, Google philosophy after all
2. Extensible width
3. Ad-free

I think these can be improved

1. Name. Honestly speaking, the Turkish name “Orkut” is very unfamiliar. Just a remark, as the brand name is not supposed to change
2. Very few, if any, extensions

Yahoo! Mash

What I like about it

1. Wider width
2. Larger font
3. Allows profiles to be updated by friends
4. Mini-feed is also supplied

I think these can be improved

1. Check boxes to select friends to add should be provided
2. More group levels
3. Informal language. I am especially not easy with the word “fugly”
4. Profile with non-removable fields such as “What’s most likely playing on my iPod”… Excuse me, can I NOT have an iPod?

MySpace

107 million users. The currently largest site

What I like about it

1. Integrated all-in-one solution that includes social networking, blogging, mail, favorites, forum, movies, events, media

I think these can be improved

1. Inconsistent design
2. Music landing page
3. Spam, including spam invitations, protection
4. Tons of ads

Other notable networking sites

Read more

Wikipedia, List of social networking websites

Mashable, Facebook Hammers MySpace on Almost All Key Features

Techcrunch, Facebook platform

American Class Divisions

Nerdlifestyle, Media restrictions

My choice

Facebook to keep in touch with international friends and English-speaking communities

Yahoo! Mash. Many young Vietnamese users rely on Yahoo! services

for socially musical networking

How about you?

Share your experience here…

Which site do you like best? What you wish your site had offered?

1. What is Tag

1.1. Definition

A tag is a relevant keyword associated with a piece of information, thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification of information.

The piece of information can be files, web pages, images, bookmarks, or blog entries.

Typically, one item contains multiple tags.

Usually a tag contains a link to display all items associated with that tag.

1.2. Tagcloud

A tag cloud is a visual depiction of a collection of tags used on a collections of items. Often, more frequently used tags are more emphasized.

Display order of tag cloud can either be alphabetical, or sorted by popularity, or random.

A tag is frequently found on websites, but there is one good example of printed media that employs tag cloud: The Van Couversun, Wednesday January 3, 2007

1.3. Tag Folksonomy

A folksonomy describes a content that employs tags. Examples of folksonomy may include: del.icio.us, Flickr, MySpace, youtube…

Alternatively, folksonomy also describes a community using a service and navigating through information by following tags and giving tags to own data to help people find them.

Some services (Xanga, Wordpress) provide site-wide tag list while others (Blogger, Yahoo! 360) only give tag list of one owner.

Folksonomy is coined by 2 words ‘folks’ and ‘taxonomy’. ‘Taxonomy’ is from the Greek ‘taxis’ and ‘nomos’ which respectively mean ‘classify’ and ‘manage’. Folksonomy can be interpreted as ‘community classification management’.

2. What are Tags used for?

2.1. Searching

Tagging allows searching. Internet users can follow the link from a tag to retrieve all information associated to that tag.

2.2. Tag vs. Category

Categories allow classification. Tags also allow classification. How are they different?

For example, you write an article about:

“web design for web 2.0, exploiting glossy design style, with images created by Adobe Photoshop”

that article can be put under 2 categories: ‘Design’, ‘Photoshop’. Because these may be the mainstream of your website. The article can be assigned with tags like: ‘web-2.0′, ‘glossy’, ‘images’, ‘Adobe’, ‘web’, ‘web-design’, ‘Design’, ‘Photoshop’

• Categories are more structurized and static | Tags are more liberal and continually added
• Categories can have unique names | Tags need to be popular and used by many
• Categories can have long names | Tags should have less than 3 words
• Posts are usually in one to four categories | A single post can list many more tags (one Flickr photo is allow to contain 70 tags)
• Categories are not tags | Tags can be used to replace categories
• Categories define the mainstream of the website | Tags define the information in each item
• Categories help visitors to get an idea what the website is about | Tags help visitors to find different items

2.3. Drawback

Inconsistency among authors

• Different people may use different terms to identify one object.
  Example: some use ‘football’ and some use ’soccer’ to refer to one kind of sport. ‘lumber’ and ‘timber’ is another example
• Plural and singular
  Example: ‘dog’ and ‘dogs’ are two different tags
• Polysemy - words which have many meanings
  Example: ‘table’ can be a thing in the dining room or on the computer screen
• Synonyms
  Example: television and TV

Inconsistency among items of one author

• One person, at different times may give different tags to one object. For example, Bob wrote about a TV show and tagged it ‘television’. The day after, he wrote about another one and tagged it ‘tv’. Yet another day, he tagged his next post ‘TV show’.
• Unpredictability: when one adds a new tag, she may discover that many previous posts may also be associated with that tag. Editing back can be a pain.

3. Giving smart Tags

3.1. Giving smart tags can do 3 things

1. Boost visitors’ navigation: with commonly found tags, visitors save time to find the information they expect
2. Push your wiki(search_engine) pagerank: when your tags match what internet users type in their wiki(search_engine), the possibility that your page appears on top results is higher
3. Save time for regressive tag addition: when you predict a collection of tags you’re going to use, it will save time for you to add tags to previously posted entries

3.2. How to give smart tags

…or more accurately, find smart tags to give

1. Compare the tags you’re planning to use to see which is more popular. This can be done by searching each keyword with Google to record the number of results returned. More efficiently, there are utilities that enable this: Go Rank
2. Study how people tag by visiting popular tagging folksonomy

   

   • del.icio.us
   • Flickr
   • wordpress
   • Xanga Tags
   • Technorati

4. The ‘other’ Tags

Tag cloud inspiration

Ideas are expressed based on the presentation of a tag cloud depiction

Mind Map

Fun Web 2.0 Logo Cloud

The outdoor tag game

Tag is a playground game that usually involves two or more players attempting to “tag” other players by touching them with their hands. It may be made more complex with various rule modifications.

The self-writing tag game

Anyone who is tagged by a friend is to write a number of truths about her/himself, then continue to tag other friends.

The secret tag game

Anyone who is tagged needs to tag three other friends before s/he can read the “secret message” left by the tagger.

Read more here

Reference

Lorelle on Wordpress