Too many information is as useless as not enough
Talk about the new Del.icio.us interface; rethink tags' user interface
I have been notified by Lifehacker that a new Del.icio.us interface was being tested. I followed the instructions to see it and put http://del.icio.us/new/fredonsomething in my browser and pressed Enter.
When I see the thing for the first time, I stopped breathing. My brain was not able to compute what I was seeing. I was like a protagonist in a story of H.P Lovecraft. What was that?
I started, slowly, to understand what was going on with Del.icio.us. Thousands of words were spread in my screen like an endless vortex made of words and colors.
I wondered where my tags were. I had closely checked my screen, trying to decipher something to this gibberish. I finally find out that my tags was there; with some different colors dependant of the number of links tagged with them. I figured out that it was my old one colon tag list squeezed in a table.
I started to use Del.icio.us some months ago. Lately I only added bookmarks to my account, without looking at my home page. I never, ever thought that I generated as many tags with 112 entries.
After I realized it, I started to like the new interface, it's an improvement on the old one, no doubts. But it raises a question about tags.
It's sure that a simple word can't catch the meaning of a resource by itself. It's why you need many tags to describe the meaning of a resource. In this case, it's normal to have more tags than resources (links in our case).
But, is the interface that manipulate these tags is really what a user need? Do I need to see all tags that describe resources? Could we introduce a concept of meta-tags to help the user to handle this mass of (not always useful) information?
Tags can be useful but too many tags are like not enough: it's useless.
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