Wow, I guess tagging got hot. Yahoo bought Flickr, and now Del.icio.us too.

Some thoughts. I use both of these sites heavily and there seems to be a lot of concern that Yahoo is going to stick ads all over everything and generally muck things up. I’m not sure. Admittedly merging Yahoo’s ID system with Flickr’s wasn’t super pleasant, but other then that they haven’t changed anything I can see.

Keep in mind that they say Del.icio.us only has 300,000 accounts. Peanuts by Yahoo standards. Yahoo could start a social bookmarking service and have 300,000 users in there inside a week. Flickr only had 250,000 when they sold.

I think Yahoo is after bigger fish. They suspect tag based classification is going to be a huge deal and they want inside knowledge. Google knows it too, the labels on Google Base are basically tags.

What I want to see is what happens if you resort the results of a google-type text search based on Del.icio.us-type tag clustering and popularity. If I search for ‘poker’, show search results first that have a high number of ‘poker’ tags applied to them in the tag system. Or are frequently bookmarked by people who frequently use the tag ‘poker’, as they are likely intimate with poker on the net.

I’ve fiddled with implementing this but Del.icio.us is too slow to grab a few hundred URL histories on the fly remotely. I think Yahoo had the same idea and spent $30 million to speed up the process.