You will be able to apply tags to any item on the Amazon website and your tags will be collected under your profile. I like Alan's term for that - a taglist, like a wishlist. I can envisage Amazon adding RSS feeds later, so you can subscribe to tags and your friends' tags. For now Amazon has the whole "customers who used this tag also used..." thing going on, as a tie-in with their existing personalization features.

Here's an example page for the tag "money" - if you can't see the tags yet then Alan has some screenshots. Mike Arrington also has a screenshot and more details.

As Anil pointed out, these new tagging features point to the influence of The Robot Co-op's 43Things.com. Robot Co-op is made up of ex-Amazon folks and Amazon has a stake in the company.

Now, every feed page on Toluu will show a "Tags" tab. This tab displays all the tags other users have already attached to the feed, as well as a text box to immediately start entering tags. Toluu also suggests tags based on a user's previous behavior on the site. The experience is reminiscent of tagging bookmarks in delicious, where the Ajax interface also makes adding suggested tags as easy as clicking on the keyword.

Besides this, Toluu has gone out of its way to expose these new features in as many places as possible. When browsing through a list of feeds, for example, a little '+' sign appears next to every feed you mouse over, which then exposes an inline tagging interface.

Searching Tags

Because tags are now available on Toluu, the developers have also added the ability to search the complete index of all feeds in Toluu for a specific tag, which is a great way to discover new and interesting feeds to subscribe to.

Overall, we think Toluu did a great job in adding this new feature and making it easily accessible throughout the site. As the tagging feature is still pretty new, only a select few feeds actually have tags attached to them, but as more users start tagging feeds, this will surely become one of the most popular features on Toluu.

Nevertheless, there are also a number of benefits for event planners and group leaders. In the past the hashtag has been used to track event conversation and even field questions from an audience. Now instead of displaying a scrolling Twitter feed on a trade show screen, a group can simply pull up their Facebook page and all of the in-Facebook @ tags as well as media uploads will automatically populate the page wall. This is a great way to gather up scattered conversation and keep the momentum going for inspiring events. Look for the new feature to roll out incrementally in the next couple of weeks.

In the same way that Picasa web albums offer facial recognition and tagging, Picasa 3.5 automatically scans all of your photos and groups similar faces together. From there users can add names to their photos in bulk and upload them to their web albums. One of the interesting features of this program is that names auto-complete from a user's Google contacts. While services like Face.com offer facial recognition-based tagging on Facebook, the Picasa 3.5 desktop software allows users to organize friends and groups of friends with a simple offline hard drive scan. After a couple minutes of scanning you can create name-based collages, slideshows and geo-tagged albums. The bottom line is, if you're going to get tipsy at a bachelor party, you better hope your friends have the good sense to uncheck those photos before they start uploading your Coyote Ugly bar dance antics to the wedding slideshow.

Other new features include drag and drop geo-tagging over a Google map and simultaneous uploading and sharing. In the past, photo uploaders have had to go through the additional act of selecting specific contacts to share albums. Now users can alert their contacts to an album as it's going up. Your coworkers and family may get an eyeful. At this point, facial recognition software and batch tagging is making it tougher to put on the facade of being a respectable human being. It looks like underground speakeasys are about to see a resurgence. To download the new Picasa visit Picasa.google.com.

The biggie, at least from my viewpoint, is the tagging. Feedly has always supported saving articles for later, but you just end up with a huge pile of items. Finding that really interesting piece on running a startup from last July can be tricky with no way to organize items except chronologically.

With F8, Feedly now has a rudimentary tagging system so you can group articles. I say rudimentary because at the moment, it only seems to support a single tag per item. When I'm tagging items in Evernote or other systems, I often use two or more tags. (Like "tickler" for article ideas and a relevant topic like "javascript" or "hadoop.") But at least now I can separate items into some sort of order, so that if I want to dig out a piece on Vim from six months ago it should be easier than scrolling through six months of saved items.

The other thing missing here is that you apparently can't assign tags using Feedly's excellent keyboard shortcuts. If you're used to plowing through articles using the keyboard shortcuts, you'll still have to slow down and get clicky to add a tag.

Tags are private now, but expect more goodies based around tagging with Feedly 9. According to the F8 announcement post, with Feedly 9 you'll be able to "selectively publish and share your collections." Sounds just a little like the old days of goodness with Delicious, before that service was sucked up and derailed after years of neglect by Yahoo. (Not that I'm bitter or anything.)

Views

Feedly has always had a number of different "views" you could use to browse your feeds. With Feedly 8, it adds a card view and a new titles view that displays more information for each item. The card view calls to mind a set of index cards, with the text-only posts just having the item title, summary and byline/publication info. Posts with graphics display all the summary info plus a random graphic from the post.

The so-called infinite view comes into play when you have a lot of items in your feeds. Instead of stopping at an arbitrary number of posts, you can simply keep scrolling through items as long as you have more posts to read.

If you haven't tried Feedly before, this would be a good time to check it out. You don't need to have a Google Reader account, there's a default set of feeds you can skim with Feedly even if you're not signed in. But I do recommend using it in conjunction with Google Reader. Note that Feedly syncs in real time with Google Reader, so changes made in Feedly should reflect in Google Reader as well.

The update is available immediately for Chrome and Safari, but the Firefox version is currently under review. Note that you can still install it, but you'll be warned that it could "harm your computer." For the cautious, I've installed Feedly 8 and thus far my computer seems unharmed.

The tags will appear on the "photo" tag on the Facebook Page, not on the walls and can be tagged by anyone on Facebook, not just people who have liked that page. For the start of the feature, only Facebook Pages with the "brands & products" or "people" categories can be tagged in photos. Facebook will look to expand that to more page categories over time.

This seems like a smart play by Facebook as it tries to become a stronger destination for companies and brands online. Marketers could focus viral ad campaigns around photo tagging like "show us the weirdest place you ever drank a Pepsi and win a trip to Bonnaroo" or something of that nature.

Are you going to start tagging brands in your Facebook photos? Let us know in the comments.

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.

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.

And there's another nifty feature involving photo-tagging, too - your Google+ friends can now tag your Picasa photos.

According to a FAQ on Picasa's support site, the photo-sharing service provides up to 1 GB of free storage for photos and videos to its users. But since Google+ actively encourages storing and sharing photos - its Android app even offers an "instant upload" option - there may have been some concern about storage limits among Picasa users.

As it turns out, there's nothing to worry about. If you're signed up for Google+, photos up to 2048x2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes long won't count towards this free storage limit. And Google will automatically resize photos for you when you upload them to Google+, so they stay under the free size limit.

That means only photos uploaded directly to Picasa Web Albums over the 2048x2048 size will count towards the 1 GB of free storage, explains Google. And when that limit is reached, photos will be automatically resized.

Meanwhile, for non-Google+ users, there are slightly stricter rules: photos up to 800x800 and videos up to 15 minutes won't count towards free storage. Again, when the 1 GB limit is reached, larger photos will be resized down.

Simply put, this means that whether you're on Google+ or not, Picasa offers unlimited free storage for photos and videos (under 15 minutes). The difference is that Google+ users can upload higher resolution photos to Plus/Picasa without being penalized.

Photo Tagging, Too!

There are a few other integrations between Google Plus and Picasa to take note of as well, for example, photo tagging.

This very Facebook-like feature lets anyone in your extended network in Google+ tag people in your public photos.  The person tagged is given the option to view the album and share it. If you've been tagged by someone in your Circles, the tag is automatically approved. You can remove tags on the photos homepage in Google+ or the Photos tab on your Google Profile. And if you would rather have more control, you can adjust this setting to enable manual approval of tags.

For those who were already using tagging in Picasa previously, all existing name tags in Picasa remain when you join Google+.

Additional source, re: storage - Ryo Cook, via Google Plus, of course; Above photo - it's never too early to be tagged, right Josie?

For those of you who don't know, Zigtag is another entry in the social bookmarking collection of tools. Like delicious, Diigo, and Ma.gnolia, Zigtag helps you categorize your bookmarks and share them with others. When Zigtag went into development, bookmarking was all the rage. The company's goal was to make bookmarking easier by adding a layer of semantics to the tags themselves.

Zigtag, you see, understands the meaning of the words you assign to a tag. When you tag to a page, Zigtag actually assigns it meaning rather than just a simple word. If that sounds revolutionary...well, that's because it is. Sort of.

Not the Only Semantic Tagging Service

Because of Zigtag's slow progress, they can no longer claim to be the only semantic tagging application available today. Another, Faviki, also offers an intelligent tagging service based on structured data. Both services attempt to address the problem of user-generated tags. That is, even though what you tag "NY" may be the same link that I tagged "New York," no bookmarking service ever knew the tags were related.

Zigtag and Faviki attack this problem in different ways. Faviki suggests tags for you to use, not from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted from DBpedia, a community-maintained database created by extracting information from Wikipedia.

Zigtag, however, eschews suggestions and lets you tag items as you wish. It doesn't matter what personal system you use for tagging (one word, two words, underscores, plus signs, etc.) because Zigtag understands the meaning of the tags. In Zigtag, a link tagged "New York" is returned along with other links tagged "New_York." Zigtag also understands that one tag may have different meanings and groups those items accordingly. For example, there's a New York and Company clothing store and a New York in England that may have been tagged "new york." That level of understanding is something that's unique to Zigtag and sets it apart from other bookmarking services.

Thanks to the service's ability to understand meaning, Zigtag users can join groups related a shared interest. Since Zigtag knows what you mean by your tags, it is, in theory, easier to find links you would be interested in on Zigtag than with other bookmarking services.

Is This Really Web 3.0?

Zigtag may be one of the first tools to step out of the Web 2.0 box. Where "Web 2.0" implies there is a social element to a service, it's generally speculated that Web 3.0 will bring about the intelligent web. Zigtag delivers this intelligence, but is it enough?

The only downside to Zigtag is that it requires you, the user, to manually insert the tags. In fact, it even relies on user-generated tagging and has built its entire service around that concept. That may be where Zigtag went wrong. Although two years ago, what it offered was ground-breaking and unique, as we enter 2009, we're asking the question: "Is tagging dead?"

At first, collaborative tagging, also known as a folksonomy, appeared to be the future of the web. It was a rejection of the search engine in favor of the community. It was our collective intelligence harnessed for the purpose of applying meaning and order to the pieces of the web in ways that computer-based tools could not.

As time went on, though, the one thing that made a folksonomy appealing - it was made by people! - was also the very thing that gave it problems. User-generated tags were likely to produce unreliable results. Zigtag addresses that problem, but it does not address what may end up being the true source of failure for folksonomy-based systems: people are lazy.

Now that there are myriads of services using tagging, thanks to the explosion of Web 2.0, we're getting sick of all the manual labor involved. Tag your links, tag your photos, tag your blog entries, tag your RSS feeds, etc.

While at one time, a semantic-based tagging system like Zigtag may have seemed like a vision of Web 3.0, we've now come to a point where we wonder if it does enough. It's possible the next revolution of the web won't be a system that understands the meaning of the tags we created, but knows how we would have tagged things if we had bothered to do so and then does it for us. And if that's not the future of the web...well...perhaps it should be.

Faviki's backend uses DBpedia, a community-maintained database created by extracting structured info from Wikipedia and turning that into a database which you can query. (You can read our previous coverage on DBpedia here).

This means that instead of just being words, the tags in this data model become references to objects which are categorized automatically. An example from the Faviki blog cited an example using the tag "Coca-Cola." An item you tagged with this concept would actually reference the unique URL http://dbpedia.org/data/Coca-Cola (the tag is the last part of that URL). Under other tagging systems, the same item may have been tagged with cocacola, coca-cola, coca+cola, CocaCola, but in Faviki, it's simply "Coca-Cola." And because the tags structure is already emanating from the largest collection of concepts in the world - Wikipedia - their format is already standardized and agreed upon by the community.

Using Faviki

Despite Faviki's lofty goals, it's just as easy to use as any other bookmarking service. Once you sign up, you can install a browser bookmarklet which you can use to save links and tag them. You can also search your tags or click through the site's tag cloud to view some of the most popular saved links from the Faviki community.

A Search on Faviki

Unfortunately, there is no way to import your bookmark collection from another service. This is probably because doing so would necessitate completely re-tagging every link-  that would certainly require too much effort on the part of a user if it was a manual process and I imagine it's also difficult to create a service that would automatically scan each link and tag it appropriately. However, without this option, it will be hard to get users to completely switch over from whatever service they are using now.

What Problem Faviki Solves

Because Faviki uses structured tagging, there is more that can be learned about a particular tag, its properties, and its connections to other tags. The system will automatically know what tags belong together and how they relate to others.

There has been a lot of discussion around this topic lately. At the recent Next Web conference in Amsterdam, Nova Spivack, the founder of Twine, predicted that over the next 10-15 years, tags will play an increasingly important role in the structure of the web, while keywords disappear.

If that turns out to be true, then Faviki represents a big step in that direction by offering a transitional service between social bookmarking and a purely semantic-based bookmarking service that would automatically know how to tag any content saved by discovering the semantic aspects already associated with that web page.

We spoke with Jason Mitura, the chief product officer for Viewdle, and he told us that the company would offer a real change in facial recognition technology by taking the process out of the cloud and into the device itself.

"If you put it on the smartphone, it doesn't need to communicate with the cloud," said Mitura. "We're making the analysis and recognition real-time. Our use-case makes it real time such that as you're taking the picture, it's tagged."

According to Mitura, the problem right now is that many users take numerous pictures and then upload them later, often without tagging the content. The movement toward real-time facial recognition in both photos and video will change how content is organized on the Web.

Kuk Yi, a managing partner with Best Buy, said that the company invested with Viewdle because of its movement toward real-time recognition and tagging.

"For consumers, it's all about real-time. Viewdle is leading the market by creating compelling consumer experiences that are both real-time and cross-platform," said Kuk Yi.

While tagged content can drive both pageviews and advertising dollars for publishers, Mitura noted that untagged content was "lost on the social graph."

"As our technology gains adoption," said Mitura, "I think you're going to see it spearheading the change from batch-mode uploading to real-time sharing."

Although Mitura wouldn't confirm any solid dates for product releases, we were told that we would begin seeing something from Viewdle by early next year.

We do have to agree that taking the tedium out of tagging all of your photos would be a welcome change. And having this functionality on-device, rather than in the cloud, could make for some interesting applications involving organizing and searching your media.

But nested labels is a somewhat curious addition. It turns Gmail's once-revolutionary "tagging" system into something that more closely resembles the traditional folder structure found in email programs like Outlook. So now you can drag-and-drop your email into these so-called labels and you can create hierarchies, too? Oh, c'mon, Gmail, let's just call them folders already and be done with it.

Wait! Before you rush into the comments and declare your love for nested folders, the option you've been waiting for since the day you got your Gmail invite back in 2004, hear me out.

I get it - nested folders are great. I'll probably even use them. (I am nothing, if not a Gmail filter junkie. Nearly everything get tagged upon arrival and a lot gets pre-filed, too).

The point is that these labels were introduced as a major improvement over folders because you could - Wow! - tag email messages with more than one label. That means mail could be tagged "Travel," "Coupons" and "Southwest Airlines" all at once. And wasn't that just amazing?

But the problem with Gmail's tagging system is that there's no easy way to surface the combination of these tags. For example, what if you want to see all mail tagged "Work," "From Boss" and "Project X?" Quick! How do you do it? (And don't tell me to type in some long, complex search query with colons and Boolean operators, either. Tell me how the average email user would do it). The answer? Most people don't know how. They're just going to enter a few search terms into the "search mail" box at the top of the screen. Or maybe they'll head over to the "From Boss" folder and then search for "Project X."

Missed Opportunity

Sadly, it seems that Gmail really missed an opportunity to take labels to the next level. For example: why can't there be an easy-to-use function somewhere at the top of the inbox to filter your mail by labels? Why isn't there an email intelligence system that learns how you label your mail and then starts auto-tagging it for you? Why can't Gmail figure out that if a particular message matches a filter you designed to label your incoming mail that means the message is not spam? 

No, instead of integrating a sense of intelligence into its filtering mechanisms - efforts that seem well within Google's capabilities - Gmail's labels are turning back into the ever-so-innovative folders they were meant to replace.

That's fine, I guess. I never really thought folders were that bad - it was filtering that needed an overhaul. (Have you used filters in Outlook? Gmail's are much easier.) But let's call a spade, a spade. Sure, you can label an email with 10 different tags if you want, but don't expect to find it later via some sort of advanced filtered search. Gmail's labels are folders. And tags, god bless 'em, are dead. 

While Places took center stage, a number of smaller features and tweaks were added to the latest iPhone app, not the least of which is the ability to play with your privacy settings on a post-by-post basis.

That meant, if you had a status update you didn't want to share with everyone, you better wait until later. That group of friends you defined specifically so you wouldn't mix business with pleasure was only good for when you were sitting at a desktop, not out in the world. Now, when you open the status update box in the iPhone app, a small lock icon appears, and tapping it opens up a list of custom friend lists and pre-defined privacy settings, like "Everyone", "Friends of Friends" and "Friends Only". The feature follows last month's addition of mobile privacy settings on Facebook's mobile website, which means you can now define custom friend groups and post to those groups while you're out and about.

Tagging and Beyond

In addition to these, we've also noticed that profiles and pages tagged in status updates are now shown in the Facebook app, making it easier to navigate. Last week, tagging was made even easier (from the website, not mobile) with the addition of an auto-suggest feature to the status update box. Now, navigating to those pages from the iPhone app is possible as well.

The increasing ease with which we can tag people, places and things in Facebook (as well as "like" them, of course) seems to be pushing the site further and further in the direction of making recommendations based on any number of characteristics. We are now not only connected with friends by way of our on-site friendships, but where we check in with them and how much we tag them at different places. And we're also connected to activities and products, by way of tagging those items in our updates.

We're waiting to see how all of this tagging affects our overall experience, such as the relevance of what status updates we see in our stream or what ads are displayed based on where we check in.

Yes, it's similar to the "summary" area provided by most social bookmarking sites. But as we all know, that's an area that very few users take the time to complete - or they choose to fill the area with the first sentence of the content being saved. It's rarely a summary.

Synop.it is designed expressly to capture those summaries, encouraging contributors to distill the content in a way that gives the reader context for the story as a whole. And if they find a summary that doesn't do the article justice, they're encouraged to help revise it. It's like the wiki way meets social bookmarking.

As far as drawbacks go, there's no way to judge the how one "takeaway" compares to another. Without a voting mechanism or ranking, readers may struggle to find the best summaries of content. But, users can deduce some of that information based on how many times the summary has been revised - and who has done the revising. And if the service develops a following of regular users, the on-going curation of the takeaways may make this a non-issue.

As a new service, Synop.it is still sparse in terms of content. But there's a great deal of potential here for beginning to catalogue the Web in a way that directly complements the activities of millions of social bookmark contributors. More importantly, it's an opportunity for a different kind of cataloguing that - when used in combination with other types of categorizing - can provide semantic clues for us to better understand the information around us.

If you're interested in reading some of the synopses or trying your hand at distilling Web content into a short paragraph, give Synop.it a try. Getting started is as easy as registering and adding a bookmarklet to your browser.

The new Facebook Page updating feature at hellotxt, available here, lets page admins post messages, photos, or video links to the Wall of different pages. They've actually implemented this feature in a clever way that should appeal to admins who have to keep up multiple pages as they let you tag your networks and Pages with keywords. That way, when you need to update a particular set of networks, you can prepend your update with the pound sign (#) followed by the keyword in order to update just that one particular group.

Ping.fm, the newer of the two services, has also implemented Facebook Page updates and tagging. However, in their case, they don't support tagging as a workflow timesaving feature for categorizing posts, but rather as a methodology for inserting hashtags into your posts - such as what would be used on Twitter, for example. They also support "mood tagging" on networks that support it and have added in a feature for posting songs courtesy of Grooveshark.

The process of setting up your Facebook Pages on Ping.fm is a bit more involved, too. Where hellotxt simply has you add a Facebook application, Ping.fm makes you go off an get an application key which has to be copied and pasted into a box before you can access your Facebook settings. Once there, it's not even clear if they've correctly identified your page or if those settings refer to your user profile instead.

For the individual, Ping.fm will probably suffice in most cases, but it's clear that hellotxt is the service to choose if your job involves updating multiple sets of social networks or Pages.