Why Mag.nolia and Reddit are going distribuited?

Muhammad Saleem of Mashable thinks that Mag.nolia open source move is a clear sign that bookmarks are dying. Saleen carries his claim as far as to saying that “all that is to say that bookmarking as a social activity is soon to become a thing of the past”. However, for him social news sites like Digg and Reddit should do better:

“As people move away from the rather passive activity of sharing bookmarks to actively participating in the submission, promotion, and propagation of news and networking on the basis of their interests, social news and networking sites are bound to replace bookmarking sites like Ma.gnolia and Delicious”.

But then news came that Reddit also is taking the open source route. According to Reddit co-founder, Steve Huffman, users are demanding more transparency: “Social news in general has hid behind algorithms, which has caused some consternation amongst users. Users don’t get why things aren’t showing up on the front page” (via – mashable). So now what we have are the two second place players in each sector going open source. They both bet on a distributed model to generate the critical mass that way two leads, Digg and Delicious, have. Clearly, Mag.nolia going open social cannot be in itself a sign of social bookmarking decline.

Yet, the discussion between social news and social bookmarking is still pertinent. Evidently Digg, the lead in social news is significantly bigger than Delicious, the lead on social bookmarking. There are probably several reasons why this is the case, but as far as I can tell this are the main ones:

1. It is easier to consume content at Digg that it is at Delicious. On the long run one must expect 1% of users creating content, 2% interacting with it (voting, commenting) and 97% reading it/consuming it. Unlike Delicious, at Digg content can be partially read on the site and comments are one click away. Also at Digg the interface makes it easy to scan and skim through various headlines.
2. The primary purpose to “digging” a story is to have it read by a wide audience. I have the impression that the primary reason people bookmark on delicious is to (a) keep their bookmarks online (not social related) and (b) to share it with their friends. At the most you may want to check out someone´s delicious page if you think he is a qualified influencer, but that´s about it.
3. People can game Digg easier that they can game Delicious. There is a clear and strong structure of incentives to ask others to “Digg” your stories, hence driving traffic.

None of the handicaps Delicious suffers are structural in a technical level. Rather, the first two are user interface related while the third one is “in-built viral mechanisms” related. All of them can be added to the Delicious without changing their core offering. Hence, we don´t see Digg size as a strong enough proof that social news will thrive and social bookmarking will be doomed.

Still, if Delicious where to upgrade making it easy to “consume” content, could Delicious generate the critical mass the Digg has amassed? Other way of putting this is: what is the value differentiator of social bookmarking when we compared it to social news sites?

Digg is a popularity contest while Delicious is re organizing the web. The first has the challenge to remain a cool way to find interesting news while the second has the challenge of adding value to the “passive” user. The value differentiator for Delicious is that it is simple and more versatile. Digg, as it is now conceived, is restricted to novelty and freshness. Delicious, if widely adopted not only as a bookmarking site but as a content (source) discovery destination, it can provide an alternative “information organizer” on the web.

Certainly the buzz has gone from social bookmarking to other places, but I still hold high hopes for this sector.

The problem with tags

I have been reading for a while various post on tags and bookmarking sites. As far as I can tell there are two main objections to tagging and in particular to the bookmarking sites that rely on them: the first one concerns the folksonomy method of content organization and the other the structure of incentives to add and share tags (think about bookmarking services like delicious, magnolia, et al). Let’s start with the first.

Folksonomy is a non hierarchical organization system based on common usage of words. A taxonomy made by the regular folks like you and me. The main advantage of using tags is that people can organize content in a way that is both personalized as well as constructed on popular and common usage. The problem is that tags might be too loose for an organizational format. Among other things, content ordered by loose tags often has problems of polysemy, synonymy, and depth (specificity) of tagging.

Lets imagine someone tags a specific content with “apple”: are they talking about the fruit, the company or The Beatles record label? In this case we face a problem of polysemy. But even if there are a clear univocal definitions available, different people may use different synonymous to tag content. For example, I might use “car” while someone else use “automobile”. Finally, levels of specificity may very across tags. I might tag something as “technology” while others might tag it “microprocessor”. Other challenges include acronyms as well as plural/singular tags.

The other main issue is the structure of incentives to collect (e.g., bookmark) and tag content. In short, when bookmarking sites become popular, people bookmark and tag content not according to their surfing habits using relevant tags but rather with the purpose of “gaming” the bookmarking system in order to provide relevance to links they want to drive traffic to. This renders the bookmarking system irrelevant.

More to the point, even if people where not gaming the system and even if we could agree on a level of hierarchy so that some sort of pre define structure can be provided to tags, tags and bookmarks still remain sob optimal methods to deal with information overload. At some point, we are going to get more content per tag that we can digest.

Clearly dealing with the challenges tags and bookmarks face can go a long way, but certainly at some point there we are going to face more content that that we could possible digest.

As far as I can see, if we can get tags to deal seamlessly with the challenges I just described then they are bound to add great value in the efforts to deal with information overload. But the story won´t end there. We need a more fundamental approach to the problem in order to provide a more sustainable solution.