Facebook’s distinguishing factor
No matter what changes Facebook makes to their system (per numerous announcements yesterday), their distinguishing factor is the ability for users to tag each other in videos, pictures and notes which publishes this shared content on the tagged and the tagger’s profiles, making content easier to spread and more permanent than Twitter or other social networks.
This function has not been replicated outside of Facebook. Google has tried something similar with Google Sidewiki by allowing people to talk about a website in a sidebar, but it didn’t syndicate that content to their social sphere which makes it difficult to find, especially given how few people know about Google Sidewiki.
The solution is now available
Today, Taggable launches to mixed reviews. Taggable allows anyone to tag other people on any website and send that tag to their Facebook wall and the tagged user’s wall. Privacy advocates and the TechCrunch audience are clamoring that this is a horrible idea, but I’ve toyed with it and I quite like the idea.
Taggable works on the Facebook API and allows users to sign in with Facebook, drag a bookmarklet to their browser bar and start tagging. I tested Taggable on the most recent versions of Internet Explorer, FireFox and Google Chrome. It works perfectly on iE and FF but only has partial functionality on Chrome (it does not allow you to clarify the tagged person’s role in the tagged item).
What I enjoy about this new service is that I can upload all of my event pictures to Flickr and simply tag the images from there instead of upload them to Facebook as well. What I don’t like is that it isn’t a live tag, meaning it doesn’t instantly tag people, they bundle them and release them on FB in bursts.
I have seen them post to my wall so far, but they have yet to post to the tagged peoples’ walls, so I can’t vouch for how smoothly the service works so far but it looks like it will soon aggregate to Twitter, so I’m excited about that! Lastly, the service has an arbitrary points system which I don’t understand or care for, but we all know there is a segment of the real estate industry that thrives on points. I suspect that Taggable will be big for the real estate techies.
Here’s how Taggable works:
I opened a single post on AgentGenius about the Top 10 trending topics of the week to tag the authors featured in the top 10:
For those who may not be able to see the real estate implications, just imagine that you upload a listing and tag yourself in it, your seller tags themselves in it, your seller’s neighbor tags themselves in it (look, facebook friends, the house next door is for sale, come live by me!) or if it’s a historic home, you can tag the HOA’s fan page, the historic preservation society’s fan page, and it all syndicates to the tagger’s facebook news stream AND to the tagged person’s news stream. The implications are endless, but it’s a simple way to increase exposure and passively insert your professional life into an increasingly unprofessional social network. Soon, these technologies will allow you to geo-tag images, so it will be changing the landscape even further as the gold rush that is “geo” continues.
