Today is a big day, we have just rolled out the largest update to Toluu since launch. We have been working on this for a while now, and hope you like it.
Toluu now has Tagging!
Tagging has been our #1 most requested feature and we wanted to make sure we really tailored the experience to fit Toluu, not just bolt on some frankenstein system and call it a day. The goal has been to make tagging super simple to use and pervasive across the site. Now let’s jump into how it works!
On every feed page there is a new tab called ‘Tags’. We start with a nice big text box for entering tags. We have used Ajax to make adding tags snappy. There are three other sections as well; ‘My Tags’, ‘Top Tags’, and ‘Similar Feeds’.
- ‘My Tags’ shows you how you have tagged this feed and also allows you to update your tags with in-line editing goodness.
- ‘Top Tags’ shows the most popular tags for the feed across the Toluu universe.
- ‘Similar Feeds’ scours all of the feeds in Toluu and compares the tags to find relevant matches, providing another way to discover interesting new feeds.
There is also a cool feature we call AutoSuggest, when typing a tag, we suggest tags based on your past tagging behavior. This makes it faster to enter tags, and helps keep your feeds organized.
Now, the real magic happens when you click on a tag. This will bring up a new view which shows feeds that also have that tag. Finding all of the Apple blogs or Microsoft blogs with 1-click is super cool. We heard from the community that we needed more ways to sort feeds, so we have rolled out site-wide sort options to *all* feed lists. The new sort options are: Popularity, Recent, Subscribers, and A-Z. These new sorting options will make it easier than ever to find that perfect feed.
We wanted to make tagging supper accessible, so we came up with something we call Instant Inline Tagging. When browsing any feed list on the site, a new a ‘+ Add Tag’ button appears. Clicking the button instantly exposes an inline tagging interface. You have access to the same AutoSuggest functionality and you also can even see your other tags for the feed. This makes it super easy to go through and tag a large batch of feeds at once or add a tag to an interesting feed instantly.
So you tag every one of your feeds, and now you want to quickly see all of your feeds tagged ‘tech news’, what do you do? Well, we have built a brand new view that shows you all of your tags and how many feeds you have tagged that way. This new view makes it easy for you and others to understand what types of feeds you have, and also makes discovery even easier, now you can jump right into the feeds you know you will be interested in.
Last but not least, on every profile page there is a new section ‘Top Tags’, displaying the user’s 5 most used tags. ‘Top Tags’ makes it easy to understand what type of feeds a user reads at a glance. It is also a quick way to access all of the tags the user has tagged their feeds with by clicking ‘Top Tags’
Those are the major pieces of our tagging system, but there are many other details that we didn’t mention ( you can discover them when exploring). Toluu is all about helping you discover new and interesting feeds based on your interests. Tagging is a crucial piece to organizing the hundreds of thousands of feeds in Toluu. Tagging will make it easier to find new feeds, easier to find interesting new people to follow, and help bring order to your own feed lists Every tag makes the system smarter and more useful for everyone. Please tag your feeds and help tagging take off!
