Here’s an idea someone should be working on.

There are all these Web2.0 sites out there letting you “tag” stuff. Some have excellent tagging interfaces and some are more primitive.

What about a single app that talks to all of them?

Or, more reasonably, a combination of two things:

  1. A standardised tagging API which these sites can choose to adhere to, and
  2. An app to grab a bunch of tag-object mappings according to the API and manipulate them.

That way you can focus the design of the application on tags, rather than photographs or books or bookmarks or whatever, and your implementation isn’t constrained by AJAX and web-browser restrictions.

I’m imagining here something for ‘hygienic’ purposes: periodic cleaning up rather than day-to-day use (for that you’ve got the sites themselves, after all). Plus this raises the possibility of tags crossing over from one site to another — what do the music of Tom Waits, the novels of China Miéville and the film Fallen Art have in common?1 (Actually I’m not sure quite what the answer is, but when I work it out I’d want to tag all three with it. Perhaps ‘junkyard aesthetic’?)

PS There is already a related product on the market: the EasyUtil recommendation service promises to do the number-crunching for “Customers who bought X also bought Y” matching. The LibraryThing recommendations show that this isn’t necessarily something you can successfully abstract away from the type of data under consideration (they’ve got filters for apparent global popularity, so you don’t get Hairy Pothead topping your recommendations every time, and various other “special sauce” additions, which you can’t see unless you’ve got an LT account I’m afraid — so go sign up!) but still it might work for some applications. And I think a generic solution is likely to work better for what I’m suggesting here.

Notes:

  1. Is there a tag-your-favourite-movie site? If not, there’s another idea for the taking. [↪]