Are tags for teenagers and folders for fogies? This is the question our team has been asking ourselves as we head into new areas of product development in Saasu.
I personally agree with Ethan Diamond, Director of Product Development (ex Oddpost.com) at Yahoo Mail in his view that people will tend to prefer folders over tags for handling email. I know I do and I did a quick survey around our office and we all use folders for email. Our team has a mix of X and Y gen people so its probably a fair sample. Interestingly about 2/3rds’ of us use Tags for our bookmarks. In the real world (no developers) this is probably much lower at <10%. It’s still early days for tags.
I’m a big fan of del.icio.us tagging instead of using bookmarks in browsers, however a new product we are potentially going to build will take tags from a messy teenagers bedroom to the grownups study. I’ll keep you posted. (Yes it will integrate with Saasu).
When it comes to financial transactions we have come to a similar view within our development team that folders are here to stay but that we need Tags. The combination gives both X and Y gen what they want. It also gives users flexibility to manage transactions and groups of transactions (or entities) across two filtering mechanisms. This will enable us to achieve more information leverage through reporting tools in Saasu as we add Tags to report filters.
Interesting take… I prefer tags for the most part now, but I’m probably more in the Gen Y camp. (I use Gmail with limited tags, and rely predominantly on search.)
The primary benefit I see is the ability to file into multiple categories – which folder-based systems don’t seem to handle all that well. But with NETaccounts it’s a bit different, because the combination of Folders, Contacts and Transaction Categories give me a fairly flexible and granular way of categorising things anyway.
That said, there are occasions where “hard categories” are a benefit. I’d be interested to know more about how NETaccounts will handle both – what sort of scenarios do you see where one will be used over the other? Or both in tandem?
Comment by Grant — February 20, 2007 @ 10:37 am
Just stumbled across this over at Bokardo:
Pew Study: 28% of Online Americans are Taggers
Touches on “categorisation” (folders) vs. tagging…
Comment by Grant — February 20, 2007 @ 11:05 am
And another one at Boxes and Arrows:
Doing Today’s Job with Yesterday’s Tools
Comment by grant — February 27, 2007 @ 10:37 pm