This is cool. Yahoo!’s (YHOO) MyBlogLog just launched a new feature: tagging.
If you’ve read all the press, you know by now how the idea fermented (Yahoo! Research Berkeley, Cameron Marlow, Tagsona – hmm someone’s already taken the domain name).
This is cool because tagging people is a whole lot of fun. As a taggee, you get to find out how friends and colleagues view you (apparently I have madskillz and am an all-around good guy! Cool!). As a tagger, you get to label your friends and colleagues by how you see them. Then there’s the whole organizational utility of tagging. Plus the inside jokes that suddenly get surfaced.
MyBlogLog’s open social network is also another benefit. You don’t have to create a profile in a walled garden like Facebook or MySpace (NWS); you can use any ole’ blog, created on any ole’ blogging tool, and use that as your profile or online identity, so to speak. (Not to say that Facebook or MySpace don’t have their benefits too.) MyBlogLog also differentiates a blog owner from a blog, thereby giving you an online identity that can be tagged.
Which makes me wonder… why don’t traditional social networks like Facebook and MySpace have profile tagging? Hmmm.
There are gotchas though. Surfacing inside jokes that may be misinterpreted by other people could be a gotcha. Unscrupulous people tagging nefariously without abandon could also be a gotcha. But the folks at MyBlogLog realize this and will no doubt have measures to “ungot” the gotchas.
So if you have a MyBlogLog account, tag me! Go on, do it! I’ll tag you back (ooo reciprocal tagging, there’s another interesting behavior).
