by Andy DeSoto on July 31, 2008
At long last, we have a new Delicious. Faster, more accessible, and better designed, the redesigned and renamed social bookmarking champion is no longer a vision of the future but an establishment of the present. I’m not going to cover the launch here– if you’d like to read more, check out ReadWriteWeb or TechCrunch’s excellent coverage– but rather, address an issue that’s remained relatively unchanged with the 2.0 iteration: tagging.
Tagging is a cornerstone of Delicious…
It’s safe to say that the tagging plays a large role in the Delicious framework. As one of the main navigation tabs besides “Bookmarks” and “People,” it’s clear the Delicious designers expect tagging to be well-utilized and well-loved.
When tags were released in early 2007, Mashable wondered if users would bother filling in tags. It seems they have, even if they do so grudgingly; Delicious features thousands upon thousands of dutifully-entered tags.
[click to continue...]
by Andy DeSoto on July 28, 2008
If the Internet were a royal bloodline, it’d make for one great chapter in a history book. Way back when content was king, the merit alone of an essay, video, or song was enough to warrant its success. As the months passed, however, and the amount of great material online skyrocketed exponentially, content wasn’t enough– great material needed great conversation surrounding it to ensure it truly stood out.
The evolution hasn’t stopped there, though: with time, more and more services have emerged to provide unique ways for Internet users to be creative. To help cope with the myriads of similar existing services, aggregation emerged as a method of tying one’s individual content and conversations together into one coherent bundle.
Yet the Web continues to grow. As more content and conversation is aggregated, aggregation services have even arisen to sort out the aggregates, resulting in an almost overwhelming firehose of social media noise. We need an innovator– fast– to keep us from drowning in information that is extraneous, duplicate, meaningless, or offensive.
Fortunately for the Internet, we have that innovator: FriendFeed. This new-age service has revealed to us the true ‘fourth generation’ of social media value: filtering.
[click to continue...]
by Andy DeSoto on July 25, 2008
I think 
I’ve figured out what helps make social network Plurk so sticky, why it continues to draw users back increasingly more often for longer periods of time: the Plurk timeline not only shows the conversations that you’re engaged in, but those that your friends and followers are keeping up with, too.
Let me be a bit more precise. You can pretty much categorize any update on Plurk into one of three groups:
- Your Plurk.
- A friend’s Plurk to which you’ve replied.
- A friend’s Plurk to which you haven’t replied.
It’s the way Plurk handles this third category that makes the service so unique.
[click to continue...]
