Folder-Tag mashups with muscle at Google

Google has changed another paradigm. A new front end to Google Docs and Spreadsheets is striking in many ways. First is a mashup of Folders and Tags – create a folder and it displays in a familiar left sidebar looking much like a Windows Explorer / Outlook folders view, click a folder and see it’s ‘contents’, etc. but they also behave like tags – select your doc and assign it to as many ‘folders’ as you’d like, search for tags, and so on.

Just yesterday I listened to Dave Weinberger on an IT Conversations podcast explaining why tags are inherently superior to folders in that they are attributes of the original item, being metadata they can be numerous without needing to be displayed, their inherent searchability, and so on. I love tags, so my first take on using this new Google mashup rattled my left brain a bit – why mess with the paradigm? I find myself explaining tags frequently when I discuss findability challenges in the enterprise. But folders are a concept that most folks grasp. Even though loads of people don’t quite get the Windows Explorer interface they are at least ok with the basic unit of the folder.

Google has solved one nascent problem – a lack of organizing tools around the document space – by giving folks something that behaves like the way they already handle documents. Looking closer, now there’s a higher level environment that has some attributes of the desktop – tools allowing me to manage and access my collection of stuff. They’ve just moved another step up the logical stack away from the application itself and provided a path to transition people from desktop to webtop. At the same time they’re allowing people to ease into the idea of tagging instead of filing by wrapping tags in a familiar look and feel.
This is a powerful little change that advances the state of their SaaS offerings and could expose tagging to a much broader audience. Whether you like the execution or not, it’s pretty damn clever. I wonder what the Blue Monster makes of it?