Labels Not Tags, Says Google

Ashraf Al Shafaki writes "The word 'tags' is the one in common use on the Web today and is one of the distinctive features of Web 2.0. Ever since Gmail came out, Google has decided to use the term 'label' instead of the term 'tag' despite they are basically the exact same thing and have the exact same function. Why is Google using inconsistent terminology in its products for such an important term? Is there a real difference between a tag and a label?"

Plain English

[TwelveInches]

Tag sounds like it is a temporary attachment, to be removed on arrival at its destination. Label sound as if it is a permanent attachment. At least, that is how it sounds to me who doesn't work with html etc.

Which sounds less evil?

[Anonymous Coward]

Label makes it sound as if you're just applying a name to it for sorting. Tagging sounds as if you're trying to track it for nefarious evil purposes. If you wanted to sound less evil what would you use? It's all in marketing your product folks.

Graffiti...

[Bazman]

'Tagging' is when you put a mark on someone else's property... Hence maybe tagging is what other people do to your content (as here on slashdot) whereas labelling is what you do to your gmail messages... uh, maybe.

Maybe google just think tagging sounds like graffiti-talk...

Labels vs. Tags

[jvlb]

Perhaps Google simply wants to avoid the graffiti conotations associated with "tagging".

Re:A replacement for "folder"

[asuffield]

Hardware is the easy part. The hard part is looking at a pile of a million things and trying to figure out what the tags are on that document you were writing last month.

It's a stupid idea. Filing is not about searching blindly in the style of google. Filing is about having a SYSTEM for categorising things, so that you can figure out what categories any given thing belongs in. Once you have such a system, the easiest way to implement that in software? Directories.

Sloppy labels only look good to people who have never had anything resembling a filing system, and instead just lose their documents.

Re:A replacement for "folder"

[NineNine]

Aw, heck. Documents are easy compared to other files. Let's say that I want to poke around in my Windows system files to look for files that shouldn't be there (worms, or files from just plain bad installs). How would I "browse" the related files with tags? Hell, how do you find something that is tagged wrong?

Directories are working just fine. I honestly can't think of a simpler, more effective way for handling massive amounts of files. If somebody wants to throw a harebrained "tag" system on top of their directories of files, they certainly can. I honestly can't imagine the nightmare of having a giant soup of files, organized only by tags.

Re:A replacement for "folder"

[Chabil Ha']

...Which has been done before too. What you're saying is that the relationships between your photos and the meta data is *not* hierarchical, it's relational. As the founding fathers of the RDBMS discovered, relationships between data need to allow for more than one parental relationship, as in a many to many relation.

Re:A replacement for "folder"

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I've thought about it but I think the idea needs a lot of work that's not being done.

For one, tagging needs to be a lot easier, it's easy to make a folder to drop files into, but there's nothing I've used yet where I can drop items into a "tag folder" to automatically tag them. I think a hybrid system is the way to go, I might have two groups of files that are in folders of the same folder name, but they have different parent folders for a reason, to exclude them from each other, and searching systems usually don't let me take that into account.

Anyway, what I'm saying is that I've had too many circumstances that spelunking folders was easier to do than performing a search and adding the correct exclusions to get what I want, to justify getting rid of the folder system. Maybe what is needed is a nested tagging system, subtags, I don't know, because sometimes a heirarchical system is the most effective way to find something.