Building Communities With People-Tags

Social tagging has been applied to many applications including image sharing, bookmarking and music recommendations. We have developed a application for the social tagging of people to support contact management and browsing profiles in an enterprise directory. As we expected, we found that users tag people for personal organization and for "social" motivations just as in other systems. However, an unexpected result is that users tag other users in order to create communities. By tagging, encouraging others to tag, and sharing links to tags, an active minority of users is using people-tagging to bring people together.