For those interested in tagging, I’m giving a live virtual seminar (webcast) next Thursday (July 27): Users as Information Architects: Is Tagging Right for your Site? This is the second seminar we’ve given at UIE, and we’re really excited by the response and feedback generated by the first.

I’m focusing this talk on the idea that tagging might help designers organize huge amounts of information by letting their users do it for them. Heresy! You say. Well, in some places it might turn out that tagging beats IA hands down. In others, a traditional IA still works best.

However, if you’ve read The Del.icio.us Lesson, you know that it isn’t as simple as it seems at first glance. So I’ll be talking about the ins and outs of tagging, where it seems to work well, and where it doesn’t work.

Interestingly, both Amazon and Google seem to have tagging wrong…

Now that Google’s role is changing from scrappy underdog to serious contender in challenging Microsoft’s hegemony, the views of critics and observers are changing too, from an optimistic bright white to a downtrodden dull gray. Two world-class designers, Don Norman and Derek Powazek, have recently been very critical of the search giant’s design, suggesting that Google doesn’t know what they’re doing. Are they right? Does Google succeed despite bad design? I don’t think so.

Four years ago Google was at the height of its acclaim. They could do no wrong. Much was made of their new, simplified approach to search, evidence for which was echoed in their minimalistic homepage that featured little more than an input box and a submit button. And they held to that simplicity with amazing discipline, even to the point that their users noticed. Marissa Mayer explains in a 2002 interview with Mark Hurst:

“There’s this one user, a Google zealot - we don’t know who he is - who occasionally sends an e-mail to our “comments” address. Every time he writes, the e-mail contains only a two-digit number. It took us awhile to figure out what he was doing. Turns out he’s counting the number of words on the home page. When the number goes up, like up to 52, it gets him irritated, and he e-mails us the new word count. As crazy as it sounds, his e-mails are helpful, because it has put an interesting discipline on the UI team, so as not to introduce too many links. It’s like a scale that tells you that you’ve gained two pounds.” (Emphasis added)

Fast forward to 2006, four years later, and even though Google sports nearly the exact same interface they did then, opinions about it have changed dramatically.

Continue Reading: Does Google Succeed Despite Bad Design?

Update: 7 More Reasons Why Web Apps Fail

I’m not one to believe that we’re in a Bubble 2.0 or anything like that (aren’t we always bubbular?), but here are a few ideas about why some of the web apps out there fail.

1. Focus on social instead of personal.
   Following up on my Del.icio.us Lesson post, this is a critical reason why web apps fail. Many apps focus on being the new social killer-app when, in general, people don’t have time to worry about what other people are doing, and will only use software that benefits them personally at every step. You could call this selfishness or laziness, but I would call it optimization. For example, we simply don’t have time to tag things for tagging sake. Instead, we might tag things if we think that it will help us in the future, but adding tags to an app does not a solution make.
2. They solve too many problems, or try to.
   This is when the buzzwords rear their ugly head. If you’ve got a list of problems you’re solving with an application, it stands to reason that you can’t solve any one of them fully. Instead of trying to solve more than one, focus like gangbusters on one problem and really nail it. If you think about the successful web apps out there right now that have garnered impressive mindshare, it should be easy to line up the one problem (or activity) they really get right. Flickr: photos. Del.icio.us: bookmarks. Facebook: college. Myspace: identity. Gmail: email. Plaxo: contacts. Tailrank: news. Etc…
3. They’re about making someone other than the user happy.
   So much focus is on aggregation right now that it is easy to overlook the happiness of users. Many services, such as Technorati Tags or Google Sitemaps, exist solely to make the aggregators happy, and not the user themselves. They sell themselves on incentives that sound like what a movie agent might say to an aspiring actor: “We’ll make you famous, kid. You’ll get found!”. First of all, this is all talk directed at the developer, who is not the user. That’s a huge tip-off right there. Second of all, if the aggregators had their way everyone would be using these formats, which simply dilutes the value for everyone else and only serves to lock the site into some weird relationship with the aggregator. This is not how it should be. That’s why I stopped using those two services ages ago. Instead, focus on adding features that make the user happy, and when that happens everyone else can be happy, too.

Continue Reading: 7 Reasons Why Web Apps Fail

The amazing popularity of the bookmarking site Del.icio.us is one of the hallmarks of the current social software renaissance happening on the Web. Along with Flickr, Del.icio.us is a poster child of tagging, a simple feature whereby people attach words or phrases to an item. In the case of Del.icio.us, those items are bookmarks.

While Del.icio.us rose to prominence, much was made of the ability to aggregate the tags that the service’s user population created. The resulting framework, called a folksonomy, promised to redefine web navigation. If users could tag their own bookmarks and navigate to them through a direct tag-based interface, then there was really no need for an overarching, expert-developed taxonomy. In addition, if Del.icio.us could aggregate the bookmarks over all users, they could come up with a folksonomy for everybody, based on how the total population actually valued and referred to the content.

One of the hardest problems in web design is to speak the user’s language. With folksonomies and tagging, the web site could be designed with, and evolved by, the user’s own words. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line the vast majority of excited technologists (including me) forgot the original reason why people use and enjoy Del.icio.us. I call this reason the Del.icio.us Lesson, and I first posted about it last December in Learning more about Structured Blogging. Since then, that post has become the most referenced post on Bokardo. This post is an attempt to further illustrate the Del.icio.us Lesson.

Continue Reading: The Del.icio.us Lesson

Listening to James Surowiecki’s talk on the Wisdom of Crowds (mp3) at the SXSW Conference (I’m attending vicariously), I was struck at how pervasive this idea has become in such a short period of time. And the reason, of course, is the success of Google’s Pagerank algorithm, which harnesses the wisdom of crowds to model the way we value content.

If there is one idea that encapsulates what Web 2.0 is about, one idea that wasn’t a factor before but is a factor now, it’s the idea of leveraging the network to uncover the Wisdom of Crowds. Forget Ajax, APIs, and other technologies for a second. The big challenge is aggregating whatever tidbits of digitally-recorded behavior we can find, making some sense of it algorithmically, and then uncovering the wisdom of crowds through a clear and easy interface to it.

Continue Reading: The One Crucial Idea of Web 2.0

Martin Lamonica’s piece Making Web 2.0 Pay is indicative of the growing concern among Web watchers, venture capitalists, and other interested techies who are worried how to monetize the amazing innovative period we’re in. However, I think his piece, though illuminating, is exactly the type of thing that developers should run away from immediately because it focuses on the problem of making money at the industry level, and not the level that matters: the level of your individual users.

In his piece Martin discusses issues like making money via mashups, building to flip, and commodity office applications and points to several reasons for the new boom:

1. High-speed internet connections
2. Ajax
3. APIs
4. Cheap startup costs

So Lamonica’s point is that it is simply easier to create now. These seem like very reasonable factors for the new companies and products we’re seeing. However, simply having the means doesn’t really lead to innovation…but solving someone’s problem in a better way does. So in addition to technology-related reasons, I would add a couple more factors to Lamonica’s list, including two that can directly lead to solving people’s problems…

Continue Reading: Monetize This!

Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine writer of the 20th century, wrote of the Uruguayan Funes the Memorious, whose perception and memory became infallible after falling from a horse in the mid 1880s:

We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho. These recollections were not simple; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day.

And thus Ireneo Funes lived like no other before or since, remembering all that had happened to him. And remembering that he remembered. This vicious cycle led not to the incalculable awakening of genius that one might expect. Instead, it led to the opposite: a painful sagacity of everything he wished to forget.

Continue Reading: The Digital Funes the Memorious

Greg Linden on Google’s plans for the future:

“And slide 19 (in the notes) talks about how their work is inspired by the idea of “a world with infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power.” They say that “the experience should really be instantaneous”. They say that they should be able to “house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)” which leads to a world where “the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache”. And, they say that they want “transparent personalization” that uses user “data to transparently optimize the user’s experience … implicitly.”

Transparent Personalization.

What a *great* term.

Here’s the slide deck for a talk I gave on Web 2.0 for the Greater Boston Chapter of the ACM, a non-profit educational and scientific society of computer professionals in the Boston area.

Web 2.0 - Leveraging the Network (2.74 MB pdf)

In the talk I spoke about how Web 2.0 companies distinguish themselves by leveraging the network of which they are a part. Brittanica, for example, has had a web site for quite some time and were slow to leverage the network in any particular way. Wikipedia, on the other hand, exists only because they used the available network to improve their contents communally. And Wikipedia, of course, is a much, much more popular site.

Continue Reading: Web 2.0 Talk - Leveraging the Network

Marc Canter

“the integrated DLA platform wars have begun!”