MyJeeves 1.2: To Tag Or Not To Tag…

Many people think tagging provides an elegant paradigm of organizing information. In addition, we're starting to see the "power of many" being leveraged to build fancy stuff like shared folksonomies where you plug your personal information sphere into the collective mindset.

Having sat through half a dozen usability tests for MyJeeves, however, it is pretty clear to me that foldering is a more intuitive way of organizing, especially to those new to the exciting world of personal information management.  Foldering may be clunky, but it's how people think - at least that's how they think today.  Maybe it's because we are naturally wired that way, or maybe it's because most of us grew up with Windows.  What is certain is that after a while, most users end up with an unmanageable folder hierarchy and start losing track of where things are.

What can be done to take users out of this frustrating mess?  Or more exactly, assuming that tagging is indeed one solution, how can we help users to transition from folders to tags, or at least add tagging to their repetoire?  When we were scoping MyJeeves 1.2 a while back, this was the topic of endless coffee talks…and one or two beer talks.

The first impulse was to blur the line between foldering and tagging by merging them into topics.  This turned out to be too confusing for most people. The second scenario was to overlay tagging on top of foldering, resulting in "virtual folders".  This is the approach Longhorn seems to be taking - sorry, I meant Vista...which sounds far less intimidating - and dagnabit if it didn't work.  So there you have it: "tags as virtual folders" is what we just launched with MyJeeves 1.2.  Give it a try.

In the long term, we intend to provide a smoother "upgrade path" by suggesting the gradual adoption of tagging. As users become more familiar with the process, they’ll be able to explore the collective corpus of information through related tags or their social network, and further refine their taxonomy in some kind of virtuous circle.

Btw, another cool upgrade as part of MJ 1.2 is the ability to upload your personal photos.  No, this is not meant to be competitive with something like photoblogging or social networking sites.  It was simply a user request after the 1.1 release when we added the ability to save, folder and tag photos from the Web.  A lot of people use MyJeeves for personal research or data storage, whether for an upcoming vacation or a homework assignment, and given that they were starting to store pictures on topics, they also wanted to add their personal photos.  We'll see where users want to take it from there.

Samuel Nunez
Product Manager