Fun with tags

January 18, 2005

Two weeks after our initial launch, we’ve added a few more fun things around the current hot topic of tags. First of all, we got a proper homepage for the tags, with a list of the top 200 tags (determined by the number of goals tagged with that word).

Second of all, we pulled flickr and del.icio.us into each of the tag pages, so that if, say, there are photos or links available for something that also has goals, they’ll all show up together. A few good pages to illustrate this include cooking, art, and music. Technorati beat us to the punch by a few days with this one, but we’re just happy to see all of this stuff sort of coming together. I like how we’re all thinking the same thing in terms of making this stuff available, and finding interesting ways of making them all work together. In any case, we’re linking to the Technorati page from each of our pages too. It would be really cool to somehow get goals showing up in Technorati someday too.

We also added RSS feeds on each tag page so anyone out there can keep track of which goals are tagged by a particular word.

Finally… we added a way for you to view your goals by the tags you’ve given them. For example, you can check out the way I tag my goals. Most people haven’t tagged their goals yet, so we’re not linking to this from any prominent place, but if you’ve tagged your goals you can get to it from the right column of the tag homepage.

We’re pretty excited about the future of tags (search for folksonomies on google or check out the wikipedia article if you haven’t been following this meme). The bottom line is that these tag things are simple, flexible, and they provide a useful solution to the problem of the categorizing potentially ambiguous things. Wisdom of crowds to the rescue.


Search is faster

January 12, 2005

We thought we’d tell you that the miserably slow search on 43things.com is now mercifully faster. Try it out – search for, uh – whatever you want.

Oh – and Bob and Daniel are both in San Francisco today – Bob is at MacWorld and Daniel’s playing a show. You think they’ll hook up?


it’s working

January 7, 2005