There is a new feature on Tagalus that makes adding useful definitions and comments even easier. In the Twitter widget of a tag page (in the column on the right), each tweet now has two links below it – Add as: comment or definition. By clicking on these links, you can add the tweet to Tagalus as either or a comment or definition for the current tag that you’re browsing. The result is like the image above – Tagalus will tell people that you’ve added someone else’s tweet to the page because you thought it was relevant and useful. In this case, I included a tweet that @factoryjoe had sent out referencing both @tagalus and #hashtags. All that’s required is to be logged in (OpenID or Twitter) to use this feature. Have fun!
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Saturday, February 7th, 2009New version!
Thursday, February 5th, 2009After a long wait, Tagalus has been completely rewritten from scratch. Originally, the code was written from scratch (no framework) in PHP. The code was somewhat buggy (hey, we warned you it was beta); apparently, users were experiencing sporadic errors when trying to add tags from the web interface, although adding from Twitter seemed to work fine.
The new version of Tagalus was written in Ruby with the Rails framework. #RoR and the MVC framework turns out to be a very logical way to store tags, definitions, and comments, plus the abstraction from the database layer will mean less errors when dealing with parsing and sanitization of user input.
Another benefit of the rewrite is it’s now easier to add features on the developer end. This means that users will see more features soon, including an API for grabbing tags and definitions.
For now, head over to the site and start defining some tags!
Why Use Tagalus? A Real-World Example
Friday, January 30th, 2009Google is a powerful tool for finding information quickly. However, it has a couple of shortcomings. A significant one is that if your search term is not unique to a specific subject or item, it can be difficult to narrow your search to what is contextually relevant. Here’s an example:
A jazz fan is searching for information on Mike Davis, a drummer he heard in New York. Unfortunately, searching for just “Mike Davis” leads to millions of results, with results on the drummer burried deep within them. Narrowing down the search by adding terms like “drummer” and “new york” eventually lead to relevant pages.
When searching for the meaning of a (hash)tag on Twitter, Flickr, or other services, this problem can be compounded by the fact that deciding on contextual terms can be difficult if you don’t know the meaning of the tag in the first place. Here’s the real-world example that recently happened with @tagalus:
The tag #tss was trending on Twitter, but a cursory scan of the tweets didn’t reveal anything about what #tss meant. Googling the term led to results mostly dealing with “toxic shock syndrome” and tampon websites. It seemed unlikely that such a subject would be trending on Twitter, so @tagalus sent out a request for a definition. #tss turned out to stand for “Teleseminar Secrets” (a course going on at the time), but this didn’t come up anywhere near the top of Google search results. But, if someone had defined the tag on @tagalus early on, curious parties could check @tagalus for a definition if (or before) checking Google didn’t yield interesting results.
This leads to two conclusions:
- Define your tags on Tagalus!
- Consider avoiding coining hashtags that lead to feminine hygiene products when googling the acronym, unless that’s actually what your hashtag relates to
Look and feel
Monday, January 19th, 2009We updated the look of Tagalus today making the ‘widgets’ (the boxes that displays images, tweets, etc) a bit more noticable.
More updates are coming soon, with an easier and more user-friendly interface for adding tags, definitions, and comments.
Small update
Thursday, January 15th, 2009We’re gearing up for some big updates and style changes soon, but for now, there’s just a minor update to announce:
The “View more tweets” button now sends visitors to http://twitter.tagal.us to view real-time results of Twitter searches, removing the need to click “refresh” like search.twitter.com requires. While there, feel free to log in and try out the Twitter client itself rather than just using it for searching.
Bug fixes, etc
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008Obviously, one of the most important features of Tagalus is to be able to easily set definitions of a tag. Right now, that can be done in two ways: via the website or via Twitter. A couple of users have recently encountered errors where their tags were added, but the definitons were lost. Today, both tagal.us and @tagalus are adding more advanced parsing techniques to try to ensure that this doesn’t happen again!
If you do encounter a problem using Tagalus, send us an e-mail? tagalus [at] gmail [dot] com
Thanks!
Today’s news
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008Today was another good day for Tagalus.
First off, there’s an important new feature: you can login with your Twitter name in addition to the OpenID functionality. This allows twitter users to log in and user their Twitter avatars instead of gravatars, use their Twitter display name, etc. Also, this way if users like submitting definitions via Twitter, the rest of their tags, definitions, and comments will be under the same account.
Speaking of defining via Twitter, Tagalus saw it’s first tag created through Twitter today. great way to stay warm as long as you have power. Also great for making forts.”) as well as the contextualized definition that explains why you see it on Twitter (check Bram’s definition).
First small announcements
Monday, December 22nd, 2008There were a couple public mentions of Tagalus today (thanks @brampitoyo!), marking the first public day of use. There aren’t many tags or definitions up yet – please help us out by adding what you can! All you need is an OpenID to login and start using Tagalus.
Getting closer
Sunday, December 21st, 2008Preparing for Beta
Saturday, December 13th, 2008Tagalus is preparing for Beta testing – there are still some UI bugs, but the gerenal functionality seems to be working. While the ‘to-do’ list is still lengthy, it’s looking like the first users will be able to start using the site with good stability and just see more features rolled out as I push changes to the server.