Faviki's Social Bookmarking Tool Makes Semantic Tagging Even Easier
When we first looked at Faviki, a social bookmarking application which made its debut last year, we were intrigued by their idea of "semantic tagging." What makes Faviki different from its competitors, services like del.icio.us, Diigo, and the now-defunct Ma.gnolia, is the way the service suggests tags to its users. The suggestions don't come from the community of Faviki users and their tagging history - they come from structured info extracted from the Wikipedia database.
Today, Faviki is releasing an upgrade to their service which will give you even better control over the tagging process, making bookmarking even easier than before. They're also announcing support for OpenID.
A Better Tagging Interface
The biggest upgrade today is Faviki's enhanced tagging interface. In the past, Faviki struggled with some of the tag suggestions pulled out of Wikipedia because they were too long and too hard to enter for practical use. Plus, users wanted to use tags of their own creation, not the tag suggestions.
For example, if someone is tagging an article about the soccer player "Filippo Inzaghi," they may want to tag it by the player's nickname "Pippo." Before, this was not possible. But now, if Faviki doesn't understand a tag, it will pull in possible matches and ask you "What exactly do you mean by ______?" After you pick your selection, Faviki will remember your choice.
This is an important change for the service because it means users can tag web pages any which way they want, but they're still linked to the structured data on the back-end. That way, when someone searches through Faviki's community tags, all the web pages for that particular item or concept will appear, even if people tagged them using their own personal keywords.
Beyond Wikipedia
Another change in Faviki's service is the ability to define new tags. Prior to today, the service was limited to searching Wikipedia for tag suggestions, but now it has the whole web at its fingertips. If a tag is entered which doesn't match anything from Wikipedia, Faviki will search Google for relevant URLs and then ask if the links presented represent the same tag. As multiple users go through this process, Faviki learns what URLs best represent that concept and adds the new tags created by the users to its database.
API, OpenID, and More
Faviki has also just launched a Save/Edit API that provides a way to save and edit bookmarks from other applications. In addition, they've introduced support for OpenID. Other new features arriving today include a smarter autocomplete list, the ability to convert tags, spam control, the ability to export/backup your bookmarks, and a new tag description tooltip.
The only issue we have with Faviki is the same one we had before: there's still no import function available. That means you'll have to leave your extensive bookmark collection behind if you want to use this service. We suppose that it could be difficult to properly tag and match all of our old bookmarks, but without this feature, Faviki doesn't have the best shot at attracting the heaviest users of social bookmarking services.
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Ohhhh i liked tht site...just registerred to Faviki...it is good site
semantic stuff always draws attention.
great site!
It needs import but it also needs export. Syncing back with delicious is essential for me at least if I'm going to try it out. Also, it's nice to be able to see everyone's aggregate bookmarking activities on delicious and if this doesn't contribute to that -I'm less excited about it. That's all quite a shame because this does look awesome!
@marshall - it has export (2nd to last paragraph) :)
Guys at Faviki are certainly thinking about syncing with other social bookmarking services but you have to understand that the problem is not simple under the hood. While Delicious has a sea of simple, textual tags, Faviki has a huge graph of structured, semantic tags. Figuring out how to automatically translate an arbitrary textual representation into a semantic tag with a clearly defined meaning is a multi-million dollar problem.
I'm sure Favikians will think of something, though :)
I'm more interested to see how Faviki will use the graph that's building up in its database. I'm sure it will one day allow them to provide users with features that will blow away old school social bookmarking.
Sarah,
Thank you for a great article! We are considering the importer, as well as opening data in the Linked Data fashion. This release (custom names for tags, API, OpenID) is a step towards it. The possibility of having custom names for tags is an important prerequisite for the import; otherwise much valuable data would be lost.
Marchall,
Thank you for your comment. I am glad you like Faviki :) I agree that syncing is an important feature. I hope it will be possible soon by solving the problems regarding converting tags and also by opening data to developers.
Rod,
Thanks for the comment. I also hope we will think of something ;)
The structured graph of bookmarks/tags definitely holds a great potential and that makes the whole difference. Unfortunately, it is still hard to come up with solutions that would show practical benefits of structured data for end-users. However, the Web of data is evolving fast and I believe that will happen soon.
wow!!!! It is good site...
Thanks for a great article..
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I'm currently trying to think where threaded comments fit in the roadmap right now, but it is something that is definitely planned. We're not going to say people *have* to use threaded comments, but the system shouldn't restrict people who want to have that option. Plus for larger conversations I think threaded comments make everything easier to follow.