Development Seed Blog

I just bought a book on Amazon.com and saw the site’s latest feature  - tags! When you view some items such as books or cds (tags haven’t been  incorporated throughout the entire site yet), there’s an area where you can add a tag. And if you scroll down past the familiar categorizations such as "Customers who viewed this book also viewed" you’ll see what other people tagged the item and who they are.

Right now it seems like Amazon is using tags more as a way to manage personal content rather than a public classification tool. For example, I tagged Freakonomics "economics" and wanted to search for other books tagged with that term, but didn’t see a place to do so. Amazon’s explanation of tags also starts out with how they are beneficial to organizing holiday shopping – but then I guess it’s the season.

But even if Amazon isn’t using tags as a taxonomy tool yet, I’m willing to bet that they will once enough tags have been added to make it valuable. And that could get interesting. Amazon has always been innovative in how they relate and market items to specific users. Tags will allow for a new avenue in that. Even more interesting would be that, as far as I know, it would be the first retail store to give consumers the power to directly organize how they shop. Will this lead to an easier way to find desired products or browse selections? I think it will. It may take awhile for people to get used to searching differently and
that’s probably why few websites rely solely on tagging for organization, at least for now. But anything that gives people different ways to find what they’re looking for has got to be good for business.

CNet has a great article that explains how tags work and why people are using them.