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

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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