P. S.: Post Scriptum

It is now the time to present the next project we have been working to: TagBay. And I say ‘we’, because is this project I am not alone. I did it with a friend of mine, Derek, who accepted, very patiently to code, some of the idea I have been tinkering around in the last year or so. I am speaking about how tags, and tag clouds, and distance between tags, and so on.
So, in brief we made a web site to tag material that is being sold on e-Bay. Anybody can tag any object that is being sold. Not only can any object be tagged but you can tag sellers, too (oh, we are not responsible for offensive tags, eh!).
Tags on objects can be made private or public, and you can also search among your tags, among everybody else tags, and eventually (when we code it) it will be possible to search among the tags of another user, like in del.icio.us.

Now that the summary for the people who have no time has been done, let’s try to explain the idea in the details for those who have a bit more time.

Pages:
On TagBay, right now, there are 3 type of pages: e-Bay Search Pages, TagBay Tag Search Page, TagBayUser Tag Search Page, Item Page, and Seller Page.

• Search Page: It is possible from inside Tag Bay to make searches on e-Bay on specific keywords. The user can then add tags to each object that came out, store the tags added all at once, or store the tags of a single object. The same thing can be done in the Tag Search Page
• TagBay Tag Search Page: In this page the user gets all the results for a single tag that someone have used. Nothing fancy (for now). Items where the tag only appears as a private tag will not appear here.
• TagBayUser Tag Search Page: In this page the user gets all the results for a single tag that he have used. If the user is logged in and is looking at his own tags, also the items tagged in a private way will appear.
• Item Page: Each object has its specific page. From such page any user can see what are the public tags that other users have used for that page. Also they can define their personal tags for that object, if their tags are going to be private, and the tags of the seller.
• Seller Page: And then there is the seller page, and in the seller page any user can tag any seller. The use of tag for sellers is still limited, but will be increased in the future.

The natural use of the site

• For a seller or for a shop A seller might want to use the site to tag all the objects that he is selling, giving for each object all the tags related. Thus increasing the possibility for it to be found. We suggest to list the tag in the order of importance, as soon we are going to use the order consider the importance in the search page.
  Also, if a person wants to make a cool list of objects, they can tag exactly those objects, with a tag they never used, and then link to the page in their directory of this tag. Thus creating on the spot, their lists. Also sellers will want to tag their objects, and people making searches will tag objects to make lists of objects they want to follow, before jumping on a transaction. We think there is more than enough material to generate interesting behaviour. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same emergent behaviour that we are used to see. After all we are just exploring the possibilities of social folksonomy.
• A shop To the possibilities before, a shop who is selling on ebay might be interested to make sure that the shop itself (remember that you can tag sellers, and not only shops) have all the tags related to the merchandise that they are selling
• Someone buying Our suggestion for someone who wishes to buy, on e-Bay, would be to first look under the tag search, to see if there is anybody who has already tagged any object that they are interested in. This does not necessarily be someone else who is buying, but also someone who is selling. Then tag the objects they are interested themselves, to have it in their own list of objects. Then they could go to the search e-Bay page with the necessary keywords, and add the chosen tag to all the objects interesting. At that point a first selection have been made, and all the possible objects have been tagged. At this point, he could choose one or those objects, change the tags to private, and start betting on it.
• Someone suggesting And finally if someone is just trying to suggest some possible objects, he could search e-Bay for those objects, tag them with a unique tag and present the url of the list to whoever is interested.

There are many other ways to use TagBay. In a sense TagBay is a toy, and not a game. And as every good toy it can be used for many different games. We suggest here only some of them. Also TagBay itself is rapidly evolving. We have tons of stuff we are interested in including, and if you have been reading my blog, you know how my problem is always to find people to code my ideas, more than to find them. And this is why I am so happy for Derek work!

Difficulties that we found:
There were a number of issues that came out when we started developing this program.

1. Public vs private tags:
   Why would someone tag an object if they are interested to buy it? After all aren’t they making it easier to others to find it, by adding those tags?
   This was a serious doubt that we had, and finally we decided to give the possibility to users to tag objects privately. Yet there have to be a balance between private tags and public tags, as public tags are necessary to generate the emerging folksonomy that we wish to use. So we decided for a compromise: public tags can be done from the search page, but private tags requite you to go to the specific object page. In our view (but we are ready to be proven wrong) someone would go to the search page, tag all the entries where he might be interested. Then chose one, and tag that one in a private way.
2. Limitations due to the temporary nature of the objects
   Considering that most object exist on ebay only for few weeks before being sold, wouldn’t this be not enough time to make a tag cloud and let all cool emergent properties that folksonomy induces, appear?
   Maybe, but sellers also can tag the objects they are selling, thus giving a fresh start to all the objects. Also side by side to tagging object we are giving the possibility to tag sellers. Which eventually should survive each transaction and build up an interesting tag cloud.
3. I spoke about sellers tagging their own objects, but wouldn’t this invite people to spam your site? After all, wouldn’t it be much better for a seller to add many tags to be present in many searches?
   Ah ha! You think tag clouds can be spammed. This is false. Tag clouds cannot be spammed, and no one understand this. And we shall use this site to prove it. We have nothing against spammers, they are absolutely welcome in our site and spam it as much as they feel. Add all the tags they want to each object they sell. It will make ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE in the search page. Tag clouds are unspammable. And our engine will use tag clouds as its base. Everybody else uses tag sets. And this makes them easily spammable. So, no we don’t fear spammers. In fact we hope that spammers will come to our TagBay site. They are just people trying to sell their stuff, we are trying to make sellers meet with buyers. Wouldn’t be bad to single out spammers just because they are spammers.

TagBay is obviously still in beta, and there are many things that need to be coded. If you have any idea on how to make it better please do not hesitate to contact me. If you want to make a difference on what the final product will be now is the time to do it. Also all new suggestion implemented should be listed in a special page with links to the original suggester home page.

Some of you might remember my rant, once del.icio.us was bought. And some others, who where with me from before might remember the entries I wrote on tag clouds. Some time later I was contacted from an Italian developer, Fabio Vescarelli, who asked me some help in developing some algorithms to find the distance between users in a del.icio.us like program. We had an exchange of email first , and we met in chat some other time. He was building a del.icio.us clone, Smarking. But with some interesting differences. Continue reading Review: Smarking

I wanted to start this entry congratulating with Joshua for the deal. But I won’t.
Tha facts: the web site delicious have been sold to Yahoo!.

I personally don’t dislike Yahoo. I positively hate them. For having eaten and raped startup websites, one after the other. For being totally obscure in terms of contact with the public. For refusing to answer e-mails. For being so big that they can just claim: “we are too big to answer your e-mails”. We can ignore you, and trample on you; we will not even notice. I have something personal with them from the moment they deleted my web page back in 2003; and with it all the material inside; which included some preprints of academic papers I wrote; some of them I had in single copy. I hate yahoo because they don’t get what is the web2.0 and they try hard to copy it. And when they fail in copying it, they try to buy it. As if you could buy a community. As if you could own a community. As if you could buy a language and the agreement to keep the data open.

So maybe I should congratulate with Joshua for having sold something which had no price for some real and tangible money. But I still will not. Because delicious was not only a community. It was also an experiment. A place for us geeks to meet and discuss. A place where we were changing the web. Yes WE were changing the web through our ideas. And Joshua was good in picking the best ideas. Inviting us to give more. Now do you really think this will continue under Yahoo!’s reign? Forget it! At least for my part.

But this is not the reason why I shall not congratulate with Joshua. No I shall not congratulate with him because he could have made it. Because delicious was clearly, and recognised, the best bookmarking service on the web. And with the whole community behind giving suggestion it was prosperous and growing. Because people have pleaded him to start charging, or put advertisments, or do something, but let us pay for it. Because we knew. We knew he could not possibly pay off it all by himself. And we were happy to join in. We were happy to pay. How many services are you aware of where the costumers ask to pay for them? Few indeed!

Of all the people who have commented the action I feel the person who better captures my feelings is Ronald Johnson, who comments:

Some lessons to learn here:

1. Never trust a startup service to store your important data no matter how the owner seems honest to you. Sooner or later he/she will run away with the money and YOUR data.
2. Never trust a corporate entity to continue storing your important data. Now that they stole your data, you are subjected to the user-specific ads and they abuse you no matter how strong you cry.
3. Never act like a fanboy on services you don’t trust. Instead, invest your time and knowledge on open source projects to ensure your efforts are never sold to third party evils.

I have to add, one of the thing I found most disturbing was the form whith which Joshua announced it. In evidence the words that I found most disturbing:

We’re proud to announce that del.icio.us has joined the Yahoo! family. Together we’ll continue to improve how people discover, remember and share on the Internet, with a big emphasis on the power of community. We’re excited to be working with the Yahoo! Search team – they definitely get social systems and their potential to change the web. (We’re also excited to be joining our fraternal twin Flickr!)

We want to thank everyone who has helped us along the way – our employees, our great investors and advisors, and especially our users. We still want to get your feedback, and we look forward to bringing you new features and more servers in the future.

I look forward to continuing my vision of social and community memory, and taking it to the next level with the del.icio.us community and Yahoo!

The post stinks of corporate declaration, and has already signed the destiny of delicious as just another piece in the yahoo puzzle. A more honest post would have spoken of the money that was passed. How they made an offer that could not be refused. Of the risks of the passage. It would still make people upset, but we might have felt that it was coming from Joshua and not through Joshua, from the Yahoo P.R. office.

All this calls for some actions, for I really don’t want to support Yahoo; and if all I can do is passive resistance, then that’s what I shall do!

1. I shall look for a good alternative to Yahoo, ehm, I mean del.icio.us. The folks at slashdot suggest Simpy.
2. I want to look better at microformats, and in particular at rel-tag. It might be possible to install a small bookmarking service on site, and then have it send standard info to the community at large. In this way I would not be vulnerable anymore to the next Yahoo! acquisition.
3. While I am there I should also look for ways to get out of Flickr (who has been acquire by Y! too). Don’t miss the wonderful description of the mess Yahoo is doing with the Flickr signup page. There I also heard that 23hq might be a good alternative. Still I would prefer something on site that speaks a common language.
4. I have to decide what to do with the Delicious Mind Map Maker. You see, I really don’t want to support Yahoo. Not even indirectly. So I am tempted to take it offline. But if I find a better service, and it is bound to be there now that other geeks will start migrating to come out of the belly of the beast, I might just modify it to sustain this other service. Nothing have been decided yet.
5. And then I might instead develop my own service or help someone else develop their service, using the tagclouds ideas I spoke about early.
6. And last but not least, there is the possibility that I might develop the famous search utility I have been speaking about. Up to now, apart the constraints in time, what really stopped me where ethical reasons. Joshua asked people not to screenscrape delicious, so I felt I would abide by his request. I surely did not want to tax the servers of a poor hacker. But now the ‘poor’ hacker have sold the golden eggs’ hen, and walked away with tons of cash. And I am sure Yahoo will not even notice if I start screenscraping them. At least until they start putting all sorts of advertisments which might make it too hard to do. Hmm, active resistance might have some attraction!

So I probably should congratulate with Joshua. He sold a bunch of quite simple and useless code to Yahoo. He prospected them the possibility to have a great and creative community. Now all he has to do is walk away with the cash, start a delicious clone and we will all be more than happy to join him in the new adventure. Hell! We will not even ask for our part of the booty. Although we might ask for a dinner in a good restaurant.
And I think that’s just fair.

ADDENDUM:
After reading all the comments on slashdot I found a link to a page with most bookmarking services compared. It is a bit old, so not totally updated. But yet it gives some good overviews and can be used for some good pre-screening. Also the maintainer of Simpy, Otis, wrote a long comment explaining how he might even adapt the code to make the mindmap work for that too!