I've been writing a lot recently about 'Labels' aka 'Tags.' In the previous post, I noted that Google's Gmail does not allow you to Label your Contacts. That is unfortunate, but not uncommon--most other big services disallow the labeling of friends and colleagues. The new darling "LinkedIn" gives you an Alphabetical list of Contacts, and allows you Filter based on Industries/Professions that each Contact has assigned himself to. But no labels. Similarly, Myspace, owing either to a unimaginative project team or an old Christian disinclination to tag people, offers no method to sort your Friends. Indeed, the term Friends is generic and often inappropriate. (I use the term "profile" synonmous with 'friend' because just as you have your own personal profile, the other inhabitants of Myspace have Profiles. It's a good term to mean an online representation/page pertaining to a person or persons who are you or not you.)
Here's how it goes in Myspace:
1. A Request for a Friendship (should be Relationship) comes into your inbox. Sometimes it is noted that the requesting profile is in your 'Extended Network' - meaning you have a common profile, but it does not say who or what that is.
2. You Add or Deny.
3. If Add, the profile is in Your Group of Friends ("External Profiles" ).
4. That's it.
In the Myspace world, there is no distinction between Profiles you don't know but charitably accepted versus Profiles you are almost certain represent your girlfriend. The only method to quickly view the page of often visited pals, is to put them into your Top 8/16/or 24 friends, and then jump to them from your public profile. Bogus!
When logged in, you should be able to sort your Profiles into any number of different groupings, based on attributes each profile assigned to himself as well as those you've assigned to the profile. Sign-ups to Myspace have to assign themselves to a Single master group/genre such as Comedian, Band (funny, eh that they insist on that name rather than musician). That is bogus and suprisingly narrow-minded in this day of multi-tasking. Geez. Myspace offers no suggestions to users who want to do Multiple artistic pursuits...
The big problem is, Myspace demands that users identify (label!) themselves as one and only one Type of User. And then it does not allow members to even sort their Profiles by that User Type!
The FIX:
1. let users label their personal profile(s), and to also label their external profiles.
2. Allow users to Sort their List of Profiles based on the Tags.
3. Allow users to make Lists/Groups, a feature presently available in YouTube.
In such a scenario, I could login, view a list of Best Friends, Bands I Like, view All Musicians I Know, sort by Number of Stars I've given music, show my friends by hair color, age.... It'd be very convenient.
Indeed. Returning to the subject of labeling contacts in general, throughout the many services, I'll say that Google has the best potential for devising an ideal set up of Contacts, if it can merge several of its technologies (there's no word yet whether Google/Gmail Account holders will be able to merge youtube accounts into their Google account).
Here's what I want:
1. A List of Profiles, which contain Contact Information and link to Public Profile Pages.
2. The ability to Sort those contacts based on Labels and Lists that I have created and based on the user's own tags, groups.
3. To see, at a glance, what new Output the contacts have created, or Events they have planned (that I'm not uninvited to...)
4. With a click, see the Conversations we've had, and to Start a new conversation.
Google can make it happen for these reasons:
1. It deploys Labeling through much of its services.
2. It's YouTube allows you to assign contacts to Lists you create.
3. It understands that Each Party in a Relationship can represent him/herself as well as the other. This concept is evident in Gmail's "Add Photo" feature of Contact Editing. You can upload your own photo of that contact, as well as view the Photo that the contact uploaded of herself.
4. In Gmail you can show mail based on labels, or search using a pronoun as keyword.
I hope Google pulls it all together soon. If you've seen their site recently, you've noticed that it has given a 'name' to its personal homepage: "iGoogle." That is a key step. With a name comes definition, which can expand and change... I believe you'll be seeing more streamlining of Google's user profile-based properties (youTube, picassa) so that you can assign one or more of them into your iGoogle. When that happens, you'll see the stock go back up.
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