Launching today at the Web 2.0 Expo is San Jose-based LeapTag, which is a toolbar for your web browser that lets you tag sites that you already use or come across and like, using the data to help you discover new ones based on the stuff you’ve tagged.
How It Works
Upon installing the LeapTag software, which provides a toolbar for IE and Firefox on Windows or just Firefox on the Mac, you are taken to a quick start page which installs itself as a server on your computer. Here you enter a master tag (i.e. “Web 2.0″) and 3 relevant search queries (i.e. “AJAX,” “blogging” and “social networks.”) By opening up the sidebar and clicking on your master tag (“Web 2.0″), a new page pops up and populates a list of potentially interesting things (i.e. a more specific StumbleUpon in list form). Review the list, and from what you know, click on either “Love it,” “Hate it” or “Remove.”
One the other side of things, there is a ‘Tag It!’ button that sits beside your address bar, and just like you would while using del.icio.us, you’re required to simply click on it when you come across an interesting webpage and tag it. You can either create a new tag or attach it to one of the master tags you created when you first installed it. Basically, doing all this feeds the LeapTag system with the appropriate data on what you like/dislike, and at some point when you click on the master tag in the side bar, it starts throwing out results that you will ’supposedly’ like, according to what you’ve told it.
Opinion
I’m a big fan of del.icio.us, and I’m a big fan of StumbleUpon, but when it comes a service which mashes the two together in its own way and displays (relevant!) Amazon product listings beside with its affiliate code attached in the link, I’m not too sure what to think of it. Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon have both created very complex systems and have a very large user infrastructure, and I’m just not too excited about using another service without this in place. Perhaps if it ‘officially’ mashed del.icio.us and StumbleUpon together somehow, like scanning your del.icio.us bookmarks and tags to give you relevant and interesting sites from StumbleUpon which the majority of users have approved, then that’d be something. A reinvention of the wheel just to add some bits and pieces to it? I don’t know if it’ll get anywhere.
