Son of Smart Tags
The debate over Smart Tags has errupted again. Microsoft was forced to pull the feature 4 years ago, but Google has stolen the idea and is running with it. Dave, Rogers, and othersare screaming bloody murder. Four years ago, I argued that the idea was impossible to stop, and that Google was a likely candidate to pick it up.
Essentially, I see this as a free speech issue, and I reject the derivative works arguments. And from my experience from four years ago, I don’t believe that the critics would be satisfied if the implementation were tweaked (if necessary) to pass any legal challenges based on derivative works laws. The critics want to control who talks about their content; or at least how people talk about their content. This is a losing battle.
Imagine for a moment that it is 1983, and you are a busy executive who wants to follow 20 different trade journals but doesn’t have the time. You hire an assistant and ask her to prepare each journal for you before it lands on your desk. Next to each article in the TOC, she is to scrawl a 1-5 rating of how relevant she thinks the article will be. Articles which are deemed useless are ripped out of the magazine. Post-Its are used liberally to ?tag? pages with commentary (includingscathing comments about particular authors)or cross-reference to other magazines. In each journal, she is to underline the first mention of any competitor firm, and insert a printout of the company’s most recent financial statement.
Imagine how productive you would be. Now imagine that one of the magazine publishers attempts to sue your assistant for profiting from a ?derivative work?. You would probably pity the publisher. So why should we expect this to be illegal on the WWW in 2005 when it was legal with magazines in 1983?
I honestly understand where the critics are coming from, but as long as the user consciously chooses to have her content prepared and annotated for her, it seems like a big mistake to attempt to prevent or encumber that. Trying to stifle ?Renmin Voice? is never a winner.
And I would just remind people that the original Smart Tags architecture was completely open, so every user could choose which tagging authorities to subscribe and trust. If you think that Google is a step forward in this regard, you don’t know Google. Let’s take bets on how long it will take the industry to dig out of this hole and eventually get back to the same open architecture that was shot down in 2001.
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Update: I just found some e-mails from December of 2000 where I was encouraging Jeff Reynar (then PM ofSmart Tags in Office)to make Smart Tags more RSS and web-friendly. I was suprised to see that he has moved to Google (and was alleged to be behind the feature that looks so similar to Smart Tags). From what I hear, he may have had almost no involvement in thefeature at Google. In any case, I wonder why Google didn’t just license the code from Microsoft, and get the same Smart Tags architecture that already works in Office (and worked in the browser until we were forced to yank it)? This would be more consistent for users, and would share the same open architecture. And the code was already written (both very likely use the same BHO hooks). It’s hard to imagine that they didn’t think of this.
Update: Before Evan was acquired by Google, he agreed with Dave about Smart Tags. I wonder how soon before Google starts purging search results for prior art?
Update: Scoble already talked about this, but he’s missing an important point. He says that Google can ship Smart Tags because Google is not a monopoly like Microsoft. By this logic, we would be prevented from shipping Smart Tags for Office, but we would be permitted to ship Smart Tags for MSN Search, where we are the underdog and Google has a monopoly. But interestingly enough, we were able to ship Smart Tags for Office, but not for MSN Search. This is exactly backwards to me. Given our underdog status in the search space, I see no reason not to ship the Smart Tags in MSN now.
Final Update: Dave has now published a more formulated opinion on this. He points out exactly what I said above — there is no excuse now for MSN to not follow suit. As long as the implementations are opt-in, I think any political challenges are DOA. I agree with Dave that this is a bad thing, but for different reasons. I disagree with Dave’s assumption that it would be possible to stop users from adopting this feature — even if you could shut down Google and MSFT both, the feature would ship by someone, and would be adopted, and eventually we would all be forced to follow suit. The real problem is that we let this turn into an arms race, and we’re going to end up with separate walled gardens with incompatible standards. A content provider (such as Amazon) who wishes to annotate users pages should be able to implement it once, using open standards, and have it work in Google, MSN, or Yahoo. Users should be able to chose whichever content providers they want, and it should be totally open. If the independent developers had adopted this scenario rather than fighting it, and followed the model of RSS (get broad adoption on open standards before the BigCos have a chance to get locked into competing standards), we might not be in this situation today.