Tag You’re It

Consumating.com is a new online community for geeks to hook up with other geeks, that was developed by geeks in a totally geeky way. Joking about online dating, programmers Ben Brown and Adam Mathes originally conceived Consumating.com as a joke, but when people started using it to actually find dates, they decided to get serious.

The site extends the ideas and systems of tagging proselytized by Del.icio.us, Technorati and flickr, that has spawned a social movement. We finally have a filing system for the Internet. The implications and possibilities are only beginning to be discovered – beyond just being able to search for stuff that’s related because everything is already marked and easily accessible. When tagging is applied to a social network, the network begins a self-organizing process and users virtually swarm around related interests, photos, events, and so on, adding their opinions and perceptions to the item as tags. Just scrolling thru tag sites, one feels the excitement of something that makes a lot of sense arising mysteriously out of a chaos, and spreading like wildfire.

When I talk about Consumating with other people, the first thing that pops up is – how is it different to Myspace? In other words, why do I need to participate in yet another online social network? I don’t know, I’m not. I’m curious if tagging is going to continue growing in popularity until myspace is obliged to incorporate it into its interface. Or would myspace view it as a little healthy competition, an alternative to viewing the world thru myspace lenses?

Consumating claims that tagging is not only a more efficient system of identifying and describing yourself online, but that it is more flexible, so you can show yourself off to the world “without having to fit into any rigid stereotype“. I beg to differ. Tagging is a tool for categorization. Stereotypes are built on categorizations – you are tagged “asian”, “fun-loving”, “skateboarder”, “booze”, “cooking”, etc. Although it may be true that over time, the summation of a user’s tags will be unique, on the whole, each user’s individuality has been broken down into convenient little pieces… for marketers. See the main reason why tagging may be a threat to myspace’s direct relationship marketing platform? Tagged user profiles empower marketers with almost infinite flexibility to segment and target as they wish, and the best part is that the consumers segment themselves, at no cost!

So let’s see how this social trend and its industry develops. I’m concerned that once big marketers discover how to exploit tags for direct marketing, we will see a flurry of ill-conceived and intrusive campaigns. I’m further concerned by the social implications of tagging – here in New York, it’s easy to see the real world effects of online social networks as people continue to make friends and dates online because it works well in our hectic, disconnected, modern lives. If people are only associating with the people, companies, events, activities and so on that they are directly related to, will that mean that they will be increasingly disassociating with those stereotypes that they dislike? And if that does happen, the power of the Internet to bring people together, may actually be spreading people apart in consumer clusters.