With all the tagging craze going on (del.icio.us, Flickr, LibraryThing, etc.), I’ve been wondering if tags would be useful in Beyond. Imagine being able to tag a person (or family, or line, or piece of data attached to a person) as “researching” or “notsure” or “followup” or whatever. If you’re collaborating with someone else, you could even tag the item with their name — a line tagged “matt” would then mean that Matt’s working on that particular thing. The advantage of this is that users would be able to superimpose their own organization on their data, free of chronology and other inherent groupings (though of course those would still be there, just on a different level). And of course you’d be able to search for tags and all that.

Another idea: it would be nice to know when you last worked on a line, a history of your research of sorts. Perhaps this would best be done visually, in the pedigree chart (the boldest lines being the ones you’ve worked on lately, fading out to the ones you haven’t touched in a while). Hmm…

Throughout the next while I’ll be brainstorming up ideas like this and then deciding which features are really necessary/useful and which can be relegated to post-1.0 status. Time to start compiling a possible-features list…

Technorati Tags: genealogy, tags, del.icio.us, Flickr, LibraryThing

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