This will give a view of physical folders for tagged items, without actually copying items to multiple folders. This may help people.

My experience with free-tagging is that you need a large number of resources and a large number of users interacting with those resources (and a cogent synonym mechanism) before free-tagging begins to show a significant value. Otherwise the time cost of maintaining the taxonomy can grow exponentially.

Vista, to try to answer the question, we prototyped a few different models: folders & tags side by side (like photo gallery, which tends to have more UI), hybrid (folders as tags–FUSE is also in this category) and just folders or just tags.

We expected people would want a tag-based system… but found people use folders in specific ways, and when changed, it can is very confusing. For example, people often call a folder “stuff” or “old” or “junk” –and use it to omit items… they get confused when a tag-oriented UX includes these items, especially when the “old” item is named the same as the “good” version of the item. They tended to love tags for search, browse, and HATED for save, or writing to DVD or moving to a USB stick. They didn’t like it when the open/browse dialog was different from save. People were confused (and freaked out) when they used a tag/type/search only system… because they were not able to “find their folders.”–and had spent years organizing their files into a folder hierarchy which worked “just fine”– except in search where tags seem to make a lot more sense, or for organizing photos, music, etc.

We found out that even if you could get the design perfect, even small changes can be annoying because you need to think about things you do withouth thinking… Anyway, this conversation is really interesting because it will take us awhile to figure this out, and it will evolve as people become more familiar with different systems. I think other UX issues, like sharing, privacy, identity, etc. are others which are also super challenging to get right.

Jed: “FUSE does what you want — an arbitrary data source can be realized as a set of “real” folders.”

Hmm. This does sound promising.

You’re working alone there, which makes it much harder. In a share information space you can leverage the classification work done by other people. Which is a yet another incentive to move collaboration out of email and into some kind of shared space.

The folders are native OS folders, so all applications can use them without knowing they are “virtual”.

The Windows support isn’t all there yet, but who uses Windows anyway? :-)

The second issue is tag consistency. I have the issue with long running, low volume chains, and when I see an item i sometimes get that nagging felleing that this belongs to a existing tag, but i’m not sure wich one. So maybe i get it right and maybe i don’t. This is further complicated by the next issue…

Tag hierarchy or interrelatedness. Image the simple case of product x versions 1, 2 and 3. Further deployed in locations a, b, c, which also have products y and z. permutations and combinations start to get overwhelming, and the decision to create a set identifier, a molecule, that is treated a s single tag becomes very enticing. then the need to programaticly explode the molecule to it’s constituent atomic elemental tags becomes a necessity to provide the ability to find something based on it’s atomic tags. And the need to identify molecule tags as differentiated from atom tags. Whew – I’ve become an info chemist!

The long and short of it is that information classification is fluid, and the tools for making it happen are embryonic. The

By using metaphors.
The metaphor I use is the following:

Imagine you’re managing a store. You put stuff in aisles, racks, boxes. Those are your hierarchical folders You can’t put anything in two places at the same time – that’s not possible in the physical world.

But you can put several tags/labels on stuff. You could put “1997″ on wine. And “France”, and “reserved by X”. But you can also put “1997″ on marmalade jars (not sure whether that would be a successful product), together with still other labels/tags like “for children”, or “Christmas”.

That way the shop-boy can quickly go through the aisles and racks and boxes and come up with a selection of products when someone asks: “I want to have stuff from 1997 for my company’s 10th anniversary”. Or “I want to by my little nephew a present but I have no clue what to give yet”.

You can use as many labels you want for any purpose you like, as long as you think it’s useful to be able to make the selections you think you’ll want to make later on. And you can come up with more labels anytime – whereas with the distribution of your stuff in aisles and racks and boxes, you really have to think about beforehand what the most handy way of arranging your stuff in the shop would be, because it’ll be a hell of a lot of work if you want to change that arrangement afterwards.