Folders Instead of Tags?

I’m sure you caught the buzz earlier this week when Google announced big changes to their Docs & Spreadsheets product. There were three big changes announced, but the one that caught my eye truly caused me to do a bit of a double-take: They changed tags to folders.

Almost from the day we launched people have been clamoring for folders. They’re here! Even cooler, our new folders continue to work like the tags they’ve replaced – your old tags are automatically converted to folders and documents can live in more than one folder at a time. Organizing your documents is as easy as dragging and dropping a document to a folder.

Maybe I’m confused, but that seems like a huge step back into the 90s… I fretted for several days, curious to know if a document will be able to be in two folders? That’s why I like Gmail’s labels (i.e. tags) so much more than the traditional email folders. No more dithering about which folder to file something into, just toss the appropriate labels on it and know that you’ll find it in either view.

Fortunately, tonight some odd little bug related to the “New” button was resolved (I flat out couldn’t create a new document or folder!) and I actually had the chance to experiment a bit.

I’m glad to say I was close to making a mountain out of a molehill and all the fretting was for naught — a document can be in all sorts of “folders”. As far as I can tell, all that really changed here is nomenclature and icons. Same expected functionality and results.

Now that more traditional users will start using folders (as you can bet they didn’t embrace those new-fangled tags), how do you explain to them that a document can actually exist in more than one folder at a time? That’s going to be a bit of a UI challenge, I’d think.

Google has folders, tags and labels depending on which product you’re using. Maybe time to pick one? Or was this a first step towards that end.

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