TAG SALES
Whaddya know? Amazon and Yahoo!, two of the three ecommerce gorillas announcing the addition of tags to their shopping service on the same day? What a coincidence. More from Techcrunch here and here respectively.
Not to worry, eBay will be along shortly, I assume. They do have their hands full at the moment.
Why, tags, they are a going mainstream, whether we like it or not...
And while they're not as frickin' hard as tags have been to date, I do have some early nitpicks.
On Amazon, I can't for the life of me find the "Your Tags" area in my home page area, where I'm supposed to be able to edit and activate the service. Maybe they haven't gotten to turning it on for all their users. On the good side, a feature I applaud and look forward to using it the ability to have the tags be private.
Ideally, I'd like to have some tags private and others public, but I'm not sure it's doable in this early release.
No sinister reason for wanting private tag lists, other than it's holiday time, and I'd rather not advertise what I'm considering getting for friends and family, with friends and family beforehand.
Back to Amazon, searching for the "Your Tags" area on the site made me realize how over-laden with STUFF the site has become over the last decade.
As the company has added feature upon feature, it takes time to find and get to the product descriptions as your eye wanders all over the page. Amazon, enough with the Tammy Fay Baker approach to adding features...it may be time for to re-think the UI (user-interface).
At least give us an Ajaxified "F9" button as in Apple Mac OS X (Tiger)'s Expose feature where all the extraneous stuff "whooshes" away to give just the relevant product stuff.
Ok, coming off the side-rant.
On Yahoo! they're calling it "Pick List" but it's not clear whether one can make them private and not share with the world. On the other hand, it's clear where to access the feature, and how to get started. Yahoo! does make it possible to share with others via email, which again, could be a boon for figuring out holiday gifts and the like.
And Yahoo!, what's with calling it the "Yahoo! Shoposphere"?? It's almost as bad as Blogosphere! (Ugh).
My mom's not even going to know how to pronounce it, and remember, it's not going mainstream before moms can say your brand.
Nevertheless, we've got a whole new bag of shopping tools on our hands now, what with Wish lists, Pick lists, and Tag lists.
Almost makes you nostalgic for the days when a shopping tag was just something you had remember to cut before wrapping the gift.
I have never failed to find a product I was lookign for by searching. What value can tagging products really create in a world where catalogs are searchable? This is beyond me - just when we figure out how to automagically index the internet, some-one comes along and decides that we should do it manually instead - what's up with that?
The tags I find useful are the ones I've configured my services to "listen" for and react to. But if you think about it, tagging is an unecessary intermediate step if I just had that functionality where I needed it in the first place .... I think tagging's an intermediate step to a better internet - amzn and yhoo are probably wasting investor $'s here.
Posted by: David Gibbons | Tuesday, November 15, 2005 at 02:25 PM