Amazon Joins the Tag Nation

We started poking around Amazon yesterday to read the customer reviews of John Hodgman's book The Areas of My Expertise. Sniff sniff, hmmm...things seem different. Our Beacon Hill bohemoth is up to something, testing out some new designs, and apparently some new functionality for their product pages.

We noticed first that they'd significantly slimmed down their rating system UI, and tucked it right up under the main product details at the top of the page next to the product image (not everyone will necessarily see this, we saw at least 3 different designs across various browsers/sessions). Then we saw an innocuous text-entry box, inviting us to "Tag this item". It seems that Amazon finally released (or is testing the release of) a new feature we actually find useful--this is far better than gumming up our shopping cart or wish list (which we never use) to keep track of things we might buy someday, just not right now.

By now, Amazon is just piggybacking Flickr and del.icio.us but we don't care...it is good use of a good idea. For starters, your tags can be either public or private. For anything you tag, you get to see your items and anyone else's items publicly tagged with the same phrase. You also get to see what other, different tags people assigned to your tagged items. Seattlest discovered, not surprisingly, that "want this" was already established, though so far only 6 other people have tagged items thusly. Better yet, someone tagged our "want this" 60GB black video iPod as "shiny".

We predict that folks wise to the ways of Amazon Web Services will shortly be figuring out how to create categorized Amazon lists based on user tags any day now. As an aside, Amazon also recently began allowing customers to upload their own images associated with products--some clear synergy could be had there with tags and Flickr, but we're not holding our breath on that one. Amazon almost always tries to take on every corner of the web on its own, and hasn't attempted to play well with others in the past who've clearly bested them (cough, eBay).