Hello Tagbot (a riff on Twitter tags)
Back in May I was in serious procrastination mode. I should have been writing but I was doing just about anything else.
One of those procrastination projects was Tagbot, an application that took aspects of Twitter and Dodgeball/Plazes and merged them with a command-line communication interface.
The push for Twitter tags has a number of similar ideas, so I thought I'd write about what I learned from Tagbot.
Tagbot works just like Twitter: There's a big text box into which you enter text. Once you hit "Submit" a text-processing engine extracts "tags" from the text and makes them links.
Tagbot has four kinds of tags (really, namespaces): people, places, URLs and tags. You identify that a piece of text belongs to a namespace using a prefix, like so: @[people], #[place], ^[tags], http://[URL]. (More details on the Tagbot syntax.)
A Tagbot message might look like this: "Hey @dennis, when you're in #newyork make sure you stop by the #shakeshack for a ^burger." Tagbot turns that into this:
New York and Shake Shack are already in the database, so Tagbot turns their handles into links to their individual pages:
I found a lot of lat/long data on the web--like major cities and airports--and dumped it into the places table so there would be a decent number of places.
Another "feature" (mostly superfluous but fun to write) was a wiki-like syntax for URLs and tags so that the handle could be different from the link text. So http://flickr.com|"photo sharing" gets converted to photo sharing. Similarly ^foo|"bar" would turn into a link to the page for the tag "foo" with the link text "bar."
Like Twitter, one of the central ideas with Tagbot was that the whole application (including adding people and places) could be accessible through the web, IM, email or SMS. So I used the exclamation point as a special prefix to execute commands. For example, !m+ turns on mobile notifications and !at,#shakeshack would tell Tagbot you're at the Shake Shack. The point of the last feature was to enable mobile social coordination like Dodgeball or Plazes--finding friends nearby, for example. I had email updates running for a while so I could send in commands (and photos) from my Sidekick.
I wrote up some of the commands in this help screen:
Obviously, Tagbot was heavily inspired by Twitter. I went a lot further than I needed to (I was experimenting) but I did make some interesting discoveries along the way.
A couple of thoughts, then, about Twitter tags. In our limited use of Tagbot we were creating all kinds of funny tags (e.g. ^soyouthinkyoucandance). A noisy tag space is only a problem if it diminishes people's perception of the value of tags. Our tagging patterns never seemed to gel in any way--in part because it was ^so ^easy ^to ^add ^tags. Almost too easy, ^know ^what ^I ^mean?
Twitter tags are really about really simple group forming, and maybe some of those channel features will encourage more focused tagging than what I've described.
Ultimately, though, I don't think tags were really essential to Tagbot (ironic, no?) and I wouldn't be surprised to see a similar pattern in Twitter. Del.icio.us offers a good example here--tag subscriptions (for me) are more noisy/less valuable than my network.
However, with enough use, some workable tagging conventions, norms, etc. could emerge. That's the beauty of a social system--the community find ways to adapt features to its own needs.
On the other hand, I did see big value in merging Twitter-like messaging simplicity with places. The problem is that places require additional metadata to really work well. And it's hard to reduce that metadata to a 1) short, 2) simple, 3) easy-to-remember, 4) unique handle. Sure it works well for cities (#newyork) or airports (#yyz), but what about Starbucks or Denny's? There are way too many of those to meet all four of the above criteria.
Plazes is doing some of this (here are their commands), but it doesn't seem to have the simplicity and critical mass of users that Twitter has. I like their SMS interface, though.
Finally, whither Tagbot? I don't have time to work on it, but it'll continue to be hosted for the next few months. I'm still collecting geo-data whenever and wherever I can, and I might turn that into a project somewhere down the road.
