Folksonomy on the Macintosh: Del.icio.us, Flickr and Last.fm

by Devanshu Mehta Mar 02, 2006

Folksonomy is a collaborative way in which information is categorized by people on the internet.  If you have ever used Flickr, Del.icio.us, Last.fm (Audioscrobbler) or searched on Technorati, you have had a glimpse into the growing world of Folksonomy, or social software on the internet.

The key ideas behind these services are usually the sharing of information (photographs, music), classifying it through user created “tags” (metadata) and in most cases, social networking through common tastes. With a large mount of information per user and a large number of users, these can grow into extremely powerful tools to make sense of mountains of information, find new and cool stuff that matches your taste, or automatically find yourself in communities that share your interests. Most of the big social software web sites have pretty decent Macintosh support and large sub-communities of Mac users as well.

Flickr on the Mac
Flickr is a delightful place to store, share and discover photographs. It also has a lot of support for the Macintosh, both from inside the company and from outside, using their public API that allows anyone to write programs to interface with Flickr.

First of all, Flickr has the Flickr Uploadr, which is their own tool for resizing, tagging and uploading photographs, either in a batch mode or one by one. You can also drag and drop from iPhoto or Finder and it also helps you keep track of your monthly uploading allowance. Another tool built by a Flickr user, called 1001 can help you keep track of photographs by contact or tag in addition to standard uploading features. There is also an iPhoto plugin, which integrates Flickr into the popular Apple application, and a Flickr widget for Mac OS 10.4 called Flidget. The Macintosh user group at Flickr is also quite active and a great place to find Mac-minded pictures and people.

Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us does for bookmarks what Flickr does for photographs. If there was ever a link that you found and knew you would want to come back to in the future, you could bookmark it or you could Del.icio.us it. Simple bookmarks run the risk of becoming bloated and unwieldy; del.icio.us will always remain streamlined and easy search, share and explore.

For any user, Macintosh or not, the Del.icio.us Firefox extension is a must have. This will allow you to easily tag a page you are reading and provides simple access to the rest of del.icio.us. Another cool tool is delimport which indexes your del.icio.us bookmarks for on your computer so that they are searchable via Spotlight. And while you’re at del.icio.us, take a look at the most bookmarked ‘apple’ articles of recent times.

Last.fm
And finally, there is Last.fm. Last.fm uses a protocol called Audioscrobbler to keep track of what you listen to and sends it back to the Last.fm server using a plugin for iTunes. For example, you can take a look at what I am listening to right now, last week and last year. I can find people with similar music tastes, find out what people who listen to music similar to me are listening to and a whole lot of other things. Besides having an active OS X user and developer group (where U2 and Gorillaz are quite popular), they also have a music player that can play streaming music to match your tastes, similar to a particular artist or a friend’s tastes. They also have a widget for finding out what your friends are listening to.

With open programming interfaces and vibrant communities, the possibilities for these web applications are endless. With people finding new ways to make use of the information on these web sites every day, it is good to see Mac users and developers take charge.

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Comments

  • Digg is the same way, but I love them, they supply me with tons of visitors.wink

    Frozonecold had this to say on Mar 06, 2006 Posts: 32
  • @Frozonecold, digg is a big help to us here at applematters and to me on my other web sites; there just aren’t (to my knowledge) as many participatory tools available for digg. Maybe it’s just not the kind of web site where tools would add anything significant.

    Devanshu Mehta had this to say on Mar 07, 2006 Posts: 108
  • The Macintosh platform was itself becoming outdated because it was not built for multitasking, and several important software routines were programmed directly into the hardware. In addition, Apple was facing competition from OS/2 and UNIX vendors like Sun Microsystems.-Any Lab Test Now

    Ana had this to say on Sep 19, 2011 Posts: 76
  • I love Last.fm. It has two of my passions. Listening to people and meeting people. This is one of the avenue where we can interact with people who has the same music taste with yours. - Unilife Alan Shortall

    Alan Shortall had this to say on Sep 23, 2011 Posts: 35
  • This practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. ruby on rails developer

    Andrew Park had this to say on Sep 27, 2011 Posts: 4
  • Like @Alan Shortall - Last.fm i my passion. Actually I am not only listening the music. I met there one group of people that now are my best friends. Thx for sharing this text. Blog

    Alpina had this to say on Oct 02, 2011 Posts: 154
  • Thanks for sharing. Really helpful post. car title loans

    Tax Attorney had this to say on Oct 04, 2011 Posts: 12
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