Cocoalicious
The Cocoalicious developers are talking about tag UIs. They like Del.icio.us Direc.tor, which somehow has a hierarchical browser for tag relationships. They hate tag clouds, finding them confusing. They like the loop interface on Garage Band, but its button-centric approach doesn’t scale past a few dozen terms.
His requirement for a good tag design:
- Scalable (needs to work with thousands of tags)
- Bighlights important relationships
- Ability to discover tags in the long tail
- Alphabetical access
- Mom 2.0 approved (easy
- Fun to use
He then shows his new interface, reminiscent of the Garage Band loops UI, with buttons with common tags at the top. Clicking a link brings up all intersecting tags, in a slick animated reordering. The related posts appear in a list below.
This is basically a fancy “Refine Search” approach, which I think is exactly right. You click on “mac” and all the tags intersecting with that term come up. Click “Powerbook” and now only the tags intersecting with Powerbook and mac will display, and those two tags are highlighted blue. I’m working on a similar approach for Urbantic, though it’s more search oriented. Question: whether to include numbers next to each tag during the refinement stage.
Someone just mentioned Treemaps as a reference.
Buzz Anderson and I talked after the presentation. Great guy, full of ideas. In particular, he has this idea that multi-part tags can define ad hoc database fields. So imagine a user’s delicious info as a table–urls, titles and tag field. Some tags might look like “artist:thebeatles”, or “soundslike:rollingstones”. Since these are name value pairs there is no reason a software like Cocoalicioius can’t parse these into the table as new columns on the fly. Pretty powerful in its simplicity. I can’t wait to see it implemented.