Google and tagging

Michael Arrington is less than impressed with the newly-launched Google Notebook. One criticism he makes about it, in comparison to del.icio.us, is that it doesn't support tagging.

Del.icio.us would have been a perfect acquisition for Google, right down to the user interface which is very Google-like. For whatever reason they let it go to Yahoo. I suspect that over time they’ll regret that decision.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of tagging being much used in any of Google's services.

There are labels in Gmail which amount to much the same thing, but the Gmail help doesn't really push these. I started out using them, but found that I didn't rely on the labels much. I just archive everything and place my trust in the search facility to find it again when I need it. And this has rarely, if ever, let me down. So my hunch is that Google are not heavily into providing or promoting tagging within their services. Their main business is search. If they get that right, then tagging is not needed.

I do miss not being able to categorise my posts on this blog by tag. I expected the Google-owned Blogger to have introduced tags by now. But at a stretch, maybe the lack of tags is not an accident, and is simply part of Google strategy. We should just throw our contect up there on the web and trust Google to find it.