My suggestion was:
1. let users label their personal profile(s), and to also label their external profiles (friends) WITH MANY keywords.
2. Allow users to Sort their Friends based on the Labels.
3. Allow users to make Lists/Groups, a feature presently available in YouTube.

Myspace’s recent change is an improvement. But, it still limits a user to categorize himself into a single, pre-defined Category. And it only allows you to place a friend into a single category.

The Myspace system apparently has trouble with such cutting-edge database structures as “many-many” relationships.

Even as it now is, though, it could greatly help a user navigate his list of profiles. At the least, she could have a Category: “Added for Quantity” and “Added for Quality (actual friend).”

New users will find this feature handy. But will legacy users, with thousands of friends, categorize all the existing friends? Only if it was Easy to do, or the user was aware of an Incentive…. Alas, and this comes as no surprise if you know Myspace, it is TEDIOUS AND TIME-CONSUMING to categorize existing friends… The user has to do it ONE AT A TIME!

Myspace’s failure to recognize the value of multiplicity has failed it again.

Here’s how it goes in Myspace:

1. A Request for a Friendship (should be Relationship) comes into your inbox. Sometimes it is noted that the requesting profile is in your ‘Extended Network’ – meaning you have a common profile, but it does not say who or what that is.
2. You Add or Deny.
3. If Add, the profile is in Your Group of Friends (“External Profiles” ).
4. That’s it.

In the Myspace world, there is no distinction between Profiles you don’t know but charitably accepted versus Profiles you are almost certain represent your girlfriend. The only method to quickly view the page of often visited pals, is to put them into your Top 8/16/or 24 friends, and then jump to them from your public profile. Bogus!

When logged in, you should be able to sort your Profiles into any number of different groupings, based on attributes each profile assigned to himself as well as those you’ve assigned to the profile. Sign-ups to Myspace have to assign themselves to a Single master group/genre such as Comedian, Band (funny, eh that they insist on that name rather than musician). That is bogus and suprisingly narrow-minded in this day of multi-tasking. Geez. Myspace offers no suggestions to users who want to do Multiple artistic pursuits…

The big problem is, Myspace demands that users identify (label!) themselves as one and only one Type of User. And then it does not allow members to even sort their Profiles by that User Type!

The FIX:
1. let users label their personal profile(s), and to also label their external profiles.
2. Allow users to Sort their List of Profiles based on the Tags.
3. Allow users to make Lists/Groups, a feature presently available in YouTube.

In such a scenario, I could login, view a list of Best Friends, Bands I Like, view All Musicians I Know, sort by Number of Stars I’ve given music, show my friends by hair color, age…. It’d be very convenient.

Indeed. Returning to the subject of labeling contacts in general, throughout the many services, I’ll say that Google has the best potential for devising an ideal set up of Contacts, if it can merge several of its technologies (there’s no word yet whether Google/Gmail Account holders will be able to merge youtube accounts into their Google account).

Here’s what I want:
1. A List of Profiles, which contain Contact Information and link to Public Profile Pages.

2. The ability to Sort those contacts based on Labels and Lists that I have created and based on the user’s own tags, groups.

3. To see, at a glance, what new Output the contacts have created, or Events they have planned (that I’m not uninvited to…)

4. With a click, see the Conversations we’ve had, and to Start a new conversation.

Google can make it happen for these reasons:
1. It deploys Labeling through much of its services.
2. It’s YouTube allows you to assign contacts to Lists you create.
3. It understands that Each Party in a Relationship can represent him/herself as well as the other. This concept is evident in Gmail’s “Add Photo” feature of Contact Editing. You can upload your own photo of that contact, as well as view the Photo that the contact uploaded of herself.
4. In Gmail you can show mail based on labels, or search using a pronoun as keyword.

I hope Google pulls it all together soon. If you’ve seen their site recently, you’ve noticed that it has given a ‘name’ to its personal homepage: “iGoogle.” That is a key step. With a name comes definition, which can expand and change… I believe you’ll be seeing more streamlining of Google’s user profile-based properties (youTube, picassa) so that you can assign one or more of them into your iGoogle. When that happens, you’ll see the stock go back up.

Then you Choose an Action to be run on the targeted messages:

The weakness lies within the Defining of Criteria. For starters, the input fields do not use the auto-fill / display of likely matches service which Google deploys in many of its other apps. This oversight is especially unsensible in the ‘From’ field, because Gmail Contacts are already stored. When I typed in my brother Kevin’s address, I had to type it in its entirety, which might have caused a wrong address. A prompt, or list of addresses matching a nickname or first few characters (which Yahoo Mail provides) would be helpful.

The major problem with the Criteria Inputs is they don’t allow multiple values. I wanted to create one Family filter. In the ‘From’ field, I should be able to “kevin OR rowland OR clyde.” Why are web services Inputs void of Boolean definitions? Remember those advanced Searches we learned in college to query library databases? They would be very helpful nowadays, too!
Say I have multiple siblings each with the same last name, and also, an unrelated friend with same last name. This would do the trick:

[From: contains] ‘hanley BUT NOT cindy’;

And in the case where I have four sisters who are married, and have different last names, I would like to do this:

[From: contains] ‘clyde’ OR ‘christine’ OR ‘kathleen’

Instead, I have to create a NEW FILTER FOR EACH sibling!! Hey, I do want to make multiple filters, but to hanle a myriad of business and personal relationships. One filter should handle the fam.

An indirect, alternative method to accomplish that wish, would be to first: Tag each of your Contacts (assign a label/keyword). Then, when creating a filter, use a Label as a Criteria.
Example:
[From: labled]: ‘fam’

However, this method is impossible as well–Gmail does not allow you to Label Contacts, nor does it allow Labels to be a Filter Criteria! But Gmail does offer to Assign Labels as a Filter’s Action.
If [From: kevin]: Then : label ‘fam’

Gmail Filters are a helpful tool for deleting or forwarding targed communications. But human users want to organize / sort messages based on Types of Contacts. The easiest way to offer that, would be to allow users to Label each contact. Gmail adds a layer of complication by not allowing the labeling of contacts, and then demanding a unique Filter for each Contact.

There is another high-exposure conflict in the tech world. In a limited view, it is a name game: Labels versus Tags. Both words are taken to mean “keywords”: any number of adjectives, nouns, verbs (y’know; the ‘Big Three’ of words) that are descriptive of an object, or symbolize analogous and related objects. At least, that is MY take on the purpose of a Tag aka Label. Although producers and consumers are increasingly encouraged to tag and label objects, most venues do not provide instructions. Indeed, for a prompt, usually a short example is all we get. This is what Google’s Blogger (yes, the very tool I’m using now) gives as a prompt:

“Labels for this post: (e.g. scooters, vacation, fall)”

Not much, eh? On the other extreme is Amazon.com, which gives a thorough education in Tagology. At the bottom of each product detail page is a heading “Tag this product” accompanied by the intuitive ‘What’s this?’ link, opening a pop-up page that includes an introductory paragraph followed by answers to “So how can I use tags?” and other questions. Since Amazon is heavily invested in tagging, it should place tags (and the ‘add a tag’ feature) atop the page, next to the image and product title.

When adding a tag at Amazon, the prompt itself is helpful. It reads: (“Separate multiple tags using commas”). There are 2 things important about that message:
1. It explicitly states how to separate multiple tags, compared to the Blogger prompt, which merely implies via an example.
2. The reality it conveys: commas as separator. Comma Separation of values works great for tags and labels (but not for all records of data—text that includes commas causes Quirks when separating with same. That’s why I’m a pipe delimiter).

Some tagging and label venues do not use the comma separator, but demand a Space between each tag. Ridiculous, isn’t it? The venue gives no explanation for this decision, nor any guidance for what to do with compound words. It is especially harmful, because tags are also used as a Search tool. And when searching, a consumer prefers to use plain English. Is the consumer expected to seek out “fishingRods?” I don’t know what these venues are thinking. Among them is the popular bookmark service “del.icio.us” If Delicious gets swallowed by Google Bookmarks, it will learn that “inferioirTechnology” can outdo a “headStart.”

Blogger now allows its bloggers to insert a module that displays “labels”, the descriptive keywords that the blogger attaches* to his post. I just added it to this blog, this past week. Labels are more relevant to a reader’s aims than just the Numbers which are Dates. Sure, a date can imply content. A December 06 post is a likely spot to find rambling about, oh, Christmas… snow. But there is no need to limit the imagination and interests of our dear readers! Labels aka tags (I’ll write a post about those synonyms and various syntax of same Friday) cut right to the subject.

Hopefully, the Tag Module will catch on. Today, a random survey of 15 blogs found just 2 which offered Label Navigation. Blogger should promote it upon Login. Heck, otherwise, the blogger only finds it by clicking on Template and browsing the possible Page Elements. And heck, as long as I’m in ‘tell Blogger what to do’ mode, add this:

* Let Readers label posts, as well as the author. When readers come to a blog with Label Navigation, they would be able to view, together, both the author and other readers’ labels.