In a blog post, the company described the update, which will be available on Instagram for iOS and Android:

“There will now be a Photos of You section on your profile. When someone adds you to a photo, you’ll receive a notification and the photo will appear in your Photos of You. Want to make sure you like the photo first? No problem: you can easily adjust your settings so nothing appears on your profile until you approve it. Before your Photos of You section is visible to other people, you’ll have until May 16th to play around and get used to the feature.”

Tagging someone is different than just mentioning them in a comment, so photos you’ve previously been @-mentioned on will not appear on your profile page immediately.

The focus on people and tagging your friends and favorite coffee shop is quintessentially Facebook, a company that’s always talking about people, whether it’s the launch of Facebook Home and a phone organized by “people instead of apps,” or the re-launch of News Feed with the emphasis on large photos of people.

And by being able to tag businesses, like your favorite coffee shop, in addition to your friends, the update points a clear path to Instagram setting up for advertising, which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted at on Wednesday’s earnings call.

“I’m really proud of how Instagram is going,” Zuckerberg said on the call Wednesday. “Kevin and his team made incredible progress since last april, and the Instagram community is growing even faster than the Facebook community did when it was this size.”

Zuckerberg said advertising on Instagram is “something we’re thinking about,” which wouldn’t be surprising as Instagram moves into its second year under Facebook’s ownership, a deal that was announced in April 2012, but hadn’t produced many changes to Instagram at first. However, tagging people and having a page aggregating photos of you are both very Facebook-like features, and being able to tag brands would set the company up to create brand-specific Instagram accounts and features like Facebook Pages.

For users, it’s important to note that the “Photos of You” will become visible to your followers on May 16, so you can play around with the feature until then and approve photos before they go live to others.

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Redbox Instant Chief marketing Officer Amy Gibby told me during a phone call Wednesday that the goal of the new site was to learn from beta testers. “We can really learn a lot from them,” she said, adding that there are already 2,000 people signed up for Redhead Nation.

One part of Redhead Nation is a daily question about some of the service’s features. Rate how the Redbox Instant dashboard works for you, and you’ll receive 100 points. Add a request for additional features, and Redbox Instant rewards you with another 50 points. Get 500 points, and you’ll be entered into a sweepstakes to win an Xbox and other prizes. And of course, there’s also a leaderboard, showing that some subscribers have already earned more than 4000 points.

Giving users rewards to answer questions about the service is smart, because it increases the likelihood that the company will actually get a good amount of feedback. But Redhead Nation seems to lay the foundation to go much further:

This is smart: Redbox Instant asks its users to tag its movies.

The site also solicits users to take part in small games and quizzes. Some of these just try to amuse the movie buff crowd, but others could actually prove to be very helpful for the site going forward. In particular, Redhead Nation asks users to add tags to movie titles offered through the service. This could be used to beef up Redbox’s metadata library, telling the service what kind of keywords its subscribers associate with some of its titles, and in turn helping to strengthen its discovery skills. Using tags in this way is “definitely a consideration,” said Gibby, adding that a part of the Redhead Nation project was to test these kinds of theories.

Established competitor Netflix has put a lot of effort into algorithmic recommendations, suggesting new titles based on subscribers rating titles they’ve seen, as well as on a whole bunch of additional data it collects when users interact with the service. A bigger focus on tagging and more active, natural-language responses from its users seems like an interesting way for Redbox Instant to counter that algorithmic approach.

The current Redhead Nation sweepstakes concludes at the end of January. Gibby said that the company hasn’t decided yet whether it will run further sweepstakes. However, it could make a lot of sense for the company to keep this going in some form or another and keep users playing to improve the company’s service.

Redbox Instant launched its private beta test at the end of December. The company is offering subscribers a Netflix-like subscription that comes with four monthly coupons for Redbox DVD rentals.

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When it comes to indexing and describing the content of videos, the key may just be to ask your users for help. At least, that seems to be the gist of a new study published this week by five researchers of the VU University Amsterdam, who analyzed around 420,000 user-generated tags collected during a video tagging project of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. The results not only show that most of these tags were useful, but also that they could complement any professional classification.

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision has been testing video tagging with a special online game called Waisda that pairs up users and lets them compete by tagging the same video simultaneously, awarding points for both speed and accuracy of tags. The VU University researchers wanted to know how many of these tags are actually real words, as opposed to just mumbo-jumbo, and how these tags differ from the language used by professionals.

The idea of crowd-sourced tag-based taxonomies, sometimes also called “folksonomies,” became popular a few years ago on the heels of the success of Flickr and Delicious. Evangelists of tagging, such as Clay Shirky, have long claimed this kind of crowd-sourcing is the only economically feasible way to deal with the massive amounts of information generated online.

However, the once-obligatory Web 2.0 tag clouds have fallen out of fashion in recent years. The use of tags has become much more focused, and has, in some cases, been completely replaced by other types of filtering. Netflix, for example, relies heavily on user-contributed ratings instead of tagging to personalize its offering. The service does use a defined set of tags to categorize content, but doesn’t allow users to add their own tags.

Hulu, on the other hand, allows its users to tag any of its videos, and YouTube also encourages creators to tag their videos. The study suggests these sites can benefit greatly from tags, especially because they capture descriptions and perspectives that people employed to categorize content tend to miss.

The researchers compared user-submitted tags with a thesaurus used by professionals to catalog audio-visual works. The result: Only eight percent of the tags submitted by users were also terms used by professional cataloguers. That means 92 percent of the tags used by average people don’t match the way professionals talk about this type of content. So if you want to help people like you and me find content, it helps to speak our language.

The study also shows there are some simple mechanisms to make tags more reliable: The Waisda game does encourage users to use tags that are more common, awarding points every time a player enters a tag that’s also used by his competitor. This mechanism adds some additional verification to the tags: terms used by more than one player are more likely relevant to the content than tags entered by just one person.

However, the researchers were sceptical of narrowing the focus too much by simply relying on these kinds of verified tags: “Our study shows that this approach would exclude many potentially useful tags,” they write, adding that most of the unverified terms still made sense to someone out there: The team entered tags that weren’t verified and couldn’t be found in either the professional thesaurus or a common dictionary into Google, and were able to get results for 82 percent of these search requests.

In other words: What you may see as a misspelled or otherwise useless tag may be someone else’s way to describe and ultimately discover your content.

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Ever since the release of the 2G iPod touch, I’ve been tempted to pick it up just for one feature alone: Nike+ integration. As a runner, I’d love some way to track my progress, and the iPhone apps that work with the device’s GPS would be great, except I don’t want to strap my iPhone to my sweaty arm, for obvious reasons.

If AppleInsider is correct, Nike+ integration might be on its way to the iPhone, too. If the new model also comes with improved moisture resistance, then the ability to take advantage of the sporting giant’s fitness tracking system will add much to the device’s appeal, at least for me. I’d love to be able to drop everything and go for a midday run without worrying about being unreachable for work or other emergencies.

Nike+ has been a frequently requested feature for inclusion in the iPhone since the release of the most recent iPod touch model, though it does present some unique hurdles on the platform. For it to be really useful, the system would have to have the ability to continue running despite the interruption of incoming calls. Background tasks, as most of us are keenly aware, are not allowed on the current or upcoming iPhone software.

Except, that is, when it comes to Apple’s own built-in software. Both Mail and iPod apps, for instance, still manage to gather and send data in the background even when not the primary app in focus on the platform. Apple could, in theory, make yet another exception for Nike+, since the app would likely be built into upcoming devices as it is with the iPod touch, rather than be something you could just download via the App Store. That’s because it requires specialized hardware to communicate with the transmitter you use in your shoe as part of the Nike+ system.

The source of the Nike+ rumor is the newest version of Apple’s iTunes software, which came out earlier this week amid other updates. Alongside this discovery came hints of a new ability to tag songs listeners hear on the radio for later purchase through iTunes. The tech isn’t necessarily iPhone-specific, but in light of recent rumors of a built-in FM radio transmitter being a part of the new iPhone’s makeover, chances seem to favor iPhone applications for the new features.

So many new transmitters, such a small device. I’m all for more and better features, but pretty soon I’m gonna start getting nervous about holding this thing next to the ol’ thought-melon for any length of time. Maybe Apple will take this opportunity to re-introduce its Bluetooth headset to allay such fears?

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Making do just got a lot easier thanks to Taglocity 2.0, a plugin which brings some much needed functionality to Microsoft’s Office-based desktop email program.

For freelance and personal purposes, I use MobileMe and Gmail, and I rarely have reason to complain about either (excluding the web-based iteration of MobileMe, which is about as consistent as West Coast weather). Gmail’s labels, recent conversations, and filtering options are especially useful. Taglocity brings that kind of functionality and more to your Outlook inbox, at the cost of a little added weight to an already resource-heavy program.

By default, Taglocity installs a pane to the far right of your Outlook browser, and and additional toolbar.

Through the toolbar you can search filter results, and tag individual emails, which works like Gmail’s labels. There will always be people on both sides of the folder/label fence. I use folders at work and labels at home, and I’m comfortable with both, but I like having the option Taglocity provides to label across and between folders.

Threaded conversations is another feature Outlook lacks that Taglocity enables.

By default, the right pane displays conversations with the sender of the email you currently have selected, along with their contact information, if you have them in your Outlook contacts database. You can switch to attachments view to quickly access all files sent between you and that person, and, at the bottom of the pane, view basic analytics including number of messages sent, received, and CC’d to and from that contact or address.

A key feature Taglocity brings to the table in terms of working with a wider group is Group creation and support. User can create, manage, and subscribe to Groups to manage multi-user announcements and FYI notices. A huge chunk of my inbox clutter is due to staff landing/departure notices, non-essential updates regarding other lines of business, and other distracting material that I can check in my downtime. With Groups this is not longer a problem, as I can choose to “pull” this kind of info when I can review it without disrupting my regular workflow. Groups also lets you share tags and set up semantic subscriptions, so that people who need to know something always get the right info, even if they’re just joining the team and without needing to be CC’d.

Even after only a couple of days, I can’t really see myself using Outlook without the added functionality of Taglocity. And since Taglocity Standard is free, I have no reason to stop. Taglocity Professional is $99, but most users will likely find the feature differences not worth the added expense.

Get Taglocity 2.0 for Outlook now and start streamlining your email workflow.

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On the web, we’ve been tagging everything for at least a couple of years now.

We tag bookmarks, photos, applications, blog posts, and on and on and on. I’ve written at length about streamlined ways to tag files within OS X, and lauded the fantastic Default Folder X from St Clair Software for their efforts to make ‘tagging’ more accessible at the save screen. But still, we have yet to see any advances from Apple at the operating system level.

I was hoping against hope this time last year, that when I got Leopard (10.5) home and installed, I’d find some new ‘keyword’, or tagging support across the operating system. But obviously that dream came and went. With speculation that the next OS X iteration will be more or less hardening the system, and maintenance type enhancements, it doesn’t seem prudent to hold my breath for that release now, either.

I suppose the tried and true way of doing things (hierarchical folders housing documents that you have to drill-down to find) continues to reign supreme. Is tagging at the operating system level just too ambiguous for users to grasp? My feeling is that if it were made more accessible, a definite change would begin to occur in the way people accessed their hard-drive-based files. But I’ve been known to talk all wild and crazy before.

So riddle me this — Do you think tagging has a place at the operating system level? Clearly it has found a home on the web, but is it really suitable for use on a computer operating system with a myriad of files and file types? I’ve found use out of such a setup, but is the ‘old school’ way of doing things still best, and should it be left un-touched? Let’s hear your thoughts, as I’m really curious as to why the tagging methodology would sing on the web, but not on our own computer systems.

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That’s just the topic of a report from Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps. While you can buy a copy of ” Executive Q&A: Social Tagging For eBusiness” for $279, here’s a free recap of the advice offered by Rotman Epps.

Consider using taxonomy-directed tagging, but give the choice. If your site suggests specific tags to the user, that encourages consistency and makes the tagging process easier for users to figure out. But don’t deny users the ability to come up with their own tags — that’s not very social. Just as it is with the people who update dictionaries, watch for the most popular uses of tags over time to expand the company collection.

Automate the process of coming up with that initial taxonomy of tags. Rotman Epps mentions several tools that can help. Endeca Technologies and Mercado Software can both extract phrases from product text that already exists on the site, and PowerReviews will do the job in a turnkey fashion by reviewing sites related to a product category, interviewing people and doing survey work.

Decide beforehand whether you’re going to go with a manual or automatic approval process for user-created tags. If your organization is concerned about filtering out junk, you may choose to go with the manual approach. The downside: It’s time-intensive, and, after all, what you want to engender with tagging in the first place is putting at least some of the content generation burden onto users. Rotman Epps says that “the relative newness of the technology makes this a concern that few companies had to confront.” She references companies that have gone the hybrid model — allowing any and all tags without prior approval, but bringing to the forefront only those tags that enhance the searchability of the site.

Broaden the appeal of tagging by making it easy to do. Have users select tags with check boxes or menus; provide help at points where it’ll best serve the readers in mouse-overs and popups; integrate tag functions with site search and navigation.

Let the user set the privacy level. Forrester recommends that you let a user determine whether his or her tags are viewable only by the person who set them, by that person’s network or by anybody using the site.

Do you have a tagging scheme worth sharing?

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First and most importantly, decide what system of tagging will work best for you. What’s your general use of these files? I tend to be a project-centric person. So my tags tend to be more about the project name, than a category that the file may fit into. What’s your end-game?

Once you know what you’re aiming for, decide on the vocabulary you’re going to use. STICK TO IT. Pluralize your tags or DON’T. Use descriptive verbs, or just basic nouns. However you decide to use your tags, stick to a system so you don’t end up with a bunch of one-offs. (pic, pictures, photo, photos, photograph, photography….) It’ll be easier if you don’t have to use wildcard search queries to bring back all the results you’re looking for.

Also, decide on how specific you want to be with your tags. Should you use ‘lettertoeditor0206′ or just ‘letter’? Will a shotgun approach of 10 simple (general) tags be more useful to you than 1 or 2 super-descriptive ones? If you’re not sure, do some testing for a couple weeks and find out what works best for your needs.

These things should get you thinking a bit. They may lead you on to other thoughts that will be even better for determining what you really need to do. If so, let us know. We could always use better processes.

On the other hand, maybe you want to follow something fairly well established, such as del.icio.us. There are tons of ‘best practices’ posted to blogs out there, so Google around a bit. That said, my del.icio.us tags are a mess – I was young and stupid, ok?!

So I skimmed some of those aforementioned Google results to see what they had to say. “Be liberal in your use of tags.” Follow what some of the more prolific del.icio.us users are doing. A study of del.icio.us tagging in a social environment.

Approach it however you feel suits you best. I find that some of the more ‘successful’ del.icio.us methods out there aren’t ideal for my Spotlight Metadata Tagging needs. Your mileage may vary.

Happy Tagging!

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