First Look: ZigTag, semantic bookmarking service
I was really tired after my interview of Werner Voegels, CTO of Amazon. CNET filmed it, so that should be up soon.
But after the interview Scott Montgomerie, president of ZigTag, showed me his new service, which is a bookmarking tool. Competes with Del.icio.us. You can hear my voice dragging at the beginning of the video I shot on my cell phone. I just didn’t want to get pitched another thing, especially not a copy of something that’s already pretty successful like del.icio.us.
But over the 12-minute demo you hear me come alive cause this was cool. Why? Because it helps you come up with much better tags, and search for them.
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March 21st, 2008 at 3:54 am
Love the idea of semantic tagging. Delicious and other well-established social bookmarking services could copy the idea in a flash though so I can’t see how they could build a business based on this. Having said that, Yahoo seem to be neglecting delicious so perhaps that could steal some of the market while delicious sleeps!
March 21st, 2008 at 7:46 am
Good another bookmarking service. Now how is this service 10% better then the top 20 bookmarking services out there? if this company can deliver on that metric that I gave above they have a chance of getting a serious foothold in getting many users to use their service. Otherwise they are sunk. Only time will tell.
March 21st, 2008 at 12:59 pm
As CEO of Zigtag I thought I’d offer my (highly biased) perspective… First of all, as far as someone duplicating what we do in a flash, well, yes we did do all the hard thinking and people can try to copy that but I just don’t think it’s that easy to build the database of semantic tags; we have over 2 million and counting - Just for perspective, the Oxford English Dictionary has definitions for around 600K words.
Second of all, we think it’s the whole package - semantic tags, newsfeed, friends, groups and, what we hope to be the easiest and fastest way to actually tag stuff (we’ve really worked hard to provide a superior UI).
Listen, I hope I’m not coming across as overly defensive - our success or lack thereof will ultimately be determined by you guys. All we can ask at this stage is that you give us a fair shot and, if you like us, spread the word!
One final point, because of the way that many existing bookmark services started out, their customers now have a fair mess to contend with should they go for semantic tags; in our case, there is exactly *one* definition of “New York (the city)” along with some known “synonyms” like “NY (the city)”, “NYC”, “The Big Apple”, “City of New York” etc., which are all directly equivalent (and clearly different in Zigtag from other definitions of New York like “New York (the state)”); other tagging systems will have “NewYork”, “New-York”, “New_York”, “NYork”, “NY” etc., and the user needs to draw inferences that these may all be the same (and in some cases aren’t e.g. when using them to tag pages about “New York (the state) or “New York (in Lincolnshire, UK)”. We’re starting with a clean slate and some pretty cool semantic data.
We’d be delighted to get more feedback – where we hit the mark and where we missed – so please keep the comments coming.
March 22nd, 2008 at 9:57 am
As CEO of Zigtag I thought I’d offer my (highly biased) perspective… First of all, as far as someone duplicating what we do in a flash, well, yes we did do all the hard thinking and people can try to copy that but I just don’t think it’s that easy to build the database of semantic tags; we have over 2 million and counting - Just for perspective, the Oxford English Dictionary has definitions for around 600K words.
Second of all, we think it’s the whole package - semantic tags, newsfeed, friends, groups and, what we hope to be the easiest and fastest way to actually tag stuff (we’ve really worked hard to provide a superior UI).
Listen, I hope I’m not coming across as overly defensive - our success or lack thereof will ultimately be determined by you guys. All we can ask at this stage is that you give us a fair shot and, if you like us, spread the word!
One final point, because of the way that many existing bookmark services started out, their customers now have a fair mess to contend with should they go for semantic tags; in our case, there is exactly *one* definition of “New York (the city)” along with some known “synonyms” like “NY (the city)”, “NYC”, “The Big Apple”, “City of New York” etc., which are all directly equivalent (and clearly different in Zigtag from other definitions of New York like “New York (the state)”); other tagging systems will have “NewYork”, “New-York”, “New_York”, “NYork”, “NY” etc., and the user needs to draw inferences that these may all be the same (and in some cases aren’t e.g. when using them to tag pages about “New York (the state) or “New York (in Lincolnshire, UK)”. We’re starting with a clean slate and some pretty cool semantic data.
We’d be delighted to get more feedback – where we hit the mark and where we missed – so please keep the comments coming.
March 23rd, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Whew! More bookmarking. I guess theres always room for one more. I’ll check it out.
March 23rd, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Sorry for the double-post. Guess I got trigger happy.
March 24th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Robert,
You’re probably aware, but this post is no longer in your RSS Feed. At least, that’s what NetVibes told me :).
March 24th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Robert,
Ditto for the “55 minutes inside Microsoft Research’s new “#99″ building” post (thought i’d just comment here again instead of there as well).
March 24th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Hey Bruce, don’t get me wrong - I think it’s a great web app, but it does seem quite hard to defend. I do wish you the best of luck though!
March 25th, 2008 at 11:18 am
No problem Tom. Best way for us to succeed is to wow our customers… do you have an account yet? If not, go to our Beta signup page and I’ll expedite. Thanks.
April 4th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
holy cow, something finally to help me tag. with the rest of the world. I don’t have to guess what other people would tag, we all agree on it!
I know you are going to hate this: but this is so 3.0
Just waitin on my delicious tags to download Richard!!
very excited. sign up for a invite, its very cool
May 6th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Will it be able to help me tag such things as my latest blog post (http://webpoet.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/in-need-of-tagging-assistant/) about not being able to tag my blog posts as well as I think my readers would like? ;)