[Design] MailTags

[Mimi Yin]

So I think a big difference between tagging in the delicious/flickr  
space versus tagging PIM data is that unlike bookmarks and photos:

+ most PIM data is fed to you (ie. email) versus sought out by you  
(ie. pictures you take, bookmarks you come across as you do research)

+ you will not need to revisit  "most email" you receive

+ it's not always clear which email will need to be revisited in the  
future, in what particular contexts (ie. this email has a phone  
number i will need in a month OR this email has the name of Doris'  
husband who turns out is someone I could get in touch with about that  
job listing.)

As a result, tagging "as email flows into your Inbox" is perhaps not  
something people do with as much fervor as "tagging bookmarks and  
photos" as they get added to the system.

Plus the likelihood that people will go back and tag items "after the  
fact" is rare. (There is some research to support this.)

I can't say for sure, but I'd be curious to find out if people who  
use both Gmail and Delicious/Flickr find themselves "Labeling in  
Gmail" and "Tagging in Delicious/Flickr" in the same ways. ie:

+ comparable total number of tags
+ comparable number of tags per item
+ comparable levels of tagging (%age of total number of items that  
are tagged)

Can anyone speak to this?

If this is true, what does that mean about the way we implement  
tagging in Chandler?

Mimi

On Jan 17, 2006, at 9:36 AM, Alec Flett wrote:

> Mimi Yin wrote:
>> However, I think the drop-down is still somewhat labor-intensive  
>> and there isn't an easy way to define new Gmail labels. Also, all  
>> labels automatically end up in your sidebar, which tends to  
>> discourage people from labeling, lest it makes their sidebar  
>> navigation un-usably overcrowded.
>>
> I'm not a big GMail user but I do use Picasa pretty heavily. I also  
> use del.icio.us and have a strong bias towards its approach to  
> tagging.
>
> I'm not convinced that the sidebar in GMail discourages people from  
> labeling - I'm merely guessing but I suspect that what it does is  
> work very well for a while, when you have just a few tags, and then  
> slowly becomes unwieldy. But since GMail doesn't provide an easy  
> way to create new tags like delicious does, I think it slows down  
> the rate of tag creation so that you have to spend more time  
> thinking about what your tag will be called. Interestingly, they  
> use the identical approach in Picasa. That said as a regular  
> del.icio.us user, it drives me nuts how hard it is to create tags.  
> So in Picasa, I have about 9 tags/labels for a a few thousand  
> pictures.
>
> Delicious has taken a novel approach in its "cloud" view by messing  
> with fonts in the tag list to show you what tags are more used than  
> others. (The more-used are more bold/big/etc) Its not the best  
> solution, but it works fairly well - at least I use delicious  
> fairly often and can usually navigate the tags to find what I'm  
> looking for in 1-2 clicks. I have well over 300 tags there for  
> about 150 bookmarks. http://del.icio.us/alecf/
>
> So basically this boils down to:
> 1) Delicious makes it really easy to create tags, which encourages  
> your taglist to get huge. However, it does some autocompletion to  
> make it easy to find existing tags as well. It tries to mitigate  
> the sea of tags that you create by providing an innovative way to  
> browse by tag. Delicious generally cover a smallish number of  
> items, each of which are very distinct (i.e. a small enough number  
> that I assign tags to them on an individual basis)
>
> 2) GMail/Picasa/etc provides a fairly easy way to assign existing  
> tags, but the assignment only works well when there are a few tags  
> - i.e. once you have more than a dozen or so tags the combo box  
> itself can get pretty unwieldy. Creating new tags is not easy  
> though, so this greatly reduces the number of tags you create.  
> There tend to be many more "items" in GMail/Picasa and they tend to  
> be closely related to each other - i.e. I might have 100 pictures  
> of just one event, or 100 e-mail messages on one topic, in a sea of  
> thousands of pictures or e-mail messages.
>
> Personally what I'd like to see in Chandler is:
> 1) delicious-style tagging in the detail view - just a textbox  
> where you type your tags, with auto-completion.
> 2) delicious/picasa-style tagging where you can select a whole  
> bunch of items and say "assign this existing tag"
>
> I think that #2 might be the best use of the "combined" detail view  
> for multiple items that I've seen to date. It would be neat if I  
> could select 100 items, and the detail view would show a "Tags:"  
> field where I could see the tags that are shared between all those  
> items. Then I could add a new tag to all of them just by typing.
>
> Alec
>
> Alec
>
>> Mimi
>>
>> On Jan 11, 2006, at 12:10 PM, Ted Leung wrote:
>>
>>> So in today's IRC office hour <http://wiki.osafoundation.org/ 
>>> script/getIrcTranscript.cgi?date=20060111> there was a side  
>>> discussion about tagging mail.   There is a plugin MailTags  
>>> <http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html>, for OS X's Mail.app that  
>>> allows you to locally tag messages, and then search, create smart  
>>> mailboxes, etc based on tags.  Unfortunately, it does not  
>>> propagate those tags into sent messages, so you can't tag  
>>> messages for someone else.
>>>
>>> Mimi commented that it made her crazy, and several people were  
>>> interested in hearing her reasoning, etc.  So this message is a  
>>> place to hang that thread.
>>>
>>> ----
>>> Ted Leung                 Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF)
>>> PGP Fingerprint: 1003 7870 251F FA71 A59A  CEE3 BEBA 2B87 F5FC 4B42
>>>
>>>
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