The Future of Social Bookmarking
Last night, my roommate (Bart of TrainCheck fame) and I co-hosted a little rooftop/poolside meet and drink with some folks who were in town for Adaptive Path’s User Experience Week 2006.
I got to talking with Kevin Cheng about social bookmarking (i.e. del.icio.us, Digg, Simpy) and the importance of this folksonomic device.
At first glance, social bookmarking seems like merely a convenient way to stash your bookmarks online. The next level reveals itself to those who bother to checkout what other users have tagged.
Kevin brought up what might be - as Bart would say - a contextual leap forward.
What if this massive tag cloud…this folksonomy that we’re creating is able to provide a social context for each of us that will help guide our online search activities and shape our online user experience?
The example Kevin used goes something like this:
What if I’m a designer and I’m searching for free fonts online? I can certainly find them, but this search has been done a million times before. What if we had a tool that enabled the tagged pages of my designer friends to float to the top of my search results based on whatever context I put myself in at the time?
What if I can click a button and change my context to LAWYER or HUSBAND or REPUBLICAN?
Have I missed something? Is someone doing this already? Please comment.
