Posts tagged as: schachter

Now Joshua can buy some servers

Just as I was about to write about my desire to replace Delicious due to its lousy performance, I read about its acquisition by Yahoo!. At least Joshua Schachter will now be able to buy enough servers to handle the load. As far as the long-term impact on the search engine balance of power, I don't think the addition of Delicious will help Yahoo! as much as their future commitment to tagging. The move that really matters is a decision by Yahoo! to fully integrate tagging into their search engine, not just My Web. The principal reason to buy Delicious now is obvious, to remove it from the table before it either gets too expensive, or is bought by a competitor. No this isn't bubble mentality, it is a good business decision in a rising market.

If you love tags, set them free

It's clear from this morning's SSA session that control is going to be the key friction point between users and providers of a tagging system. I was struck by the way the knowledgebase and database guys immediately hit on the looseness of tags as a weakness of a folksonomy. Well, yeah, of course they're loose, that's where the "folks" come from. It is this looseness, which creates a tag cloud around a concept. That cluster of words can be just as useful (or even more) than the web objects they point to.

Google has convinced advertisers and the financial markets that a large text stream, such as Google search, is extremely valuable, so it would follow that a tag stream would be more valuable, because tags are more concentrated. A freely growing tag cloud can help advertisers find the magic words that users associate with their world. I was impressed by the wisdom of Jashua Schachter's comments that he wouldn't put constraints on the way users named tags. Now that I've thought about it for a few weeks, I agree. As soon as you try manipulating the tag stream you change it in unknown ways. I think there needs to more education of the public on the difference between categorizing databases and tagging systems. We can agree to allow both to exist for different purposes.

Besides, allowing variation within a collection of tags makes evolution of the language possible. As users get better at tagging there can be an open breeding ground of new tags and compound tags. Losing this rich potential is not justified in exchange for more consistency.

Joshua Schachter, part 2

I went back to Harvard tonight for Joshua's second session at the Berkman Center. What I found most interesting was his philosophy towards users. This shows up in his handling of both user tagging and spam attacks. He said that he is constantly getting demands from the more control oriented users to restrict the use of tags, either by establishing stylistic rules, such as capitalization and the use of special characters, or by constraining the tags that users can create. He refuses to do this, and always strives to give the users as much freedom as possible, even if it breeds confusion and inconsistencies. As a control freak I find this troubling, but I think he is right in this case. Tagging is so new that adding constraints now will cut off the more ineteresting behaviors before they have a chance to emerge.

Another example of this philosophy is the way he handles spam attacks. He has found that the site gets spammed every couple of days, with such common tactics as entering thousands of copies of the same URL, or entering thousands of URLs with the same tag. He seems to have good back-end systems to monitor this, but instead of returning an error message, as most programmers (including me) would do, he just has the system ignore these entries and hide them from the public. He says that eventually the spammer gets the idea and just gives up. He says that if he were to present an active defense, the spammers would just use this to find new methods of attack. So instead of trying to hit back, he just wraps the abuser in cotton and waits until they get bored. Very bright.

Joshua Schachter of Del.icio.us visits Harvard

I attended a luncheon discussion today with Joshua Schachter, the founder of Del.icio.us, sponsored by Harvard's Berkman Center. He said that Del.icio.us was the first public tagging site, a technology that is now attracting lots of interest from the major search engines. Basically, it allows users to store their browser bookmarks online, and to assign text tags to them. Anyone can search for URLs using plain text or the assigned tags, or view all the bookmarks created by any user. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds based on a combination of users and tags. The web 2.0 term for this type of socially created category scheme is a folksonomy. I have only used the system for a few searches and haven't registered to create my own tags yet, so I don't have a strong impression of its usefulness as a search engine, but the 2 dozen or so attendees at today's session were pretty rabid.

A blogpulse search shows relatively high interest in both tagging and Del.icio.us, but surprisingly folksonomy doesn't register very high.

• Joshua is a pretty low key, humble guy who built the system without any real expectation of how well it would catch on. He seems to be following his instincts and user requests, rather than trying to fulfill some grand plan.
  
  
• I asked him about scaling both the technology and his role in the company, and he is taking on problems as they arise. The system is built with Mod_perl and a homegrown set of database tools. I know from my work with Slashdot that this can be scaled pretty far, but the hardware gets expensive. He has 8 employees, 6 of whom are programmers. Right now he is chief coder, architect, marketing head and CEO, which can't work for long. He said that he had just hired a President and a business development guy, but I wasn't sure if they counted within the current 8.
  
  
• 50% of his traffic is from robots. He doesn't know the cause of this, but I bet his many upcoming competitors are trying to suck his tagging database out of the system.
  
  
• Speaking of competitors, he applied for a job with Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and got turned down by all of them. Now they are all adding tagging to their system, and Amazon is an investor. Del.icio.us is also being courted by companies like Comcast and Nokia.
  
  
• One of the most insightful things he said was that he refuses to post rankings of top sites, because that will just encourage people to find a way to spam the ranking system.