Bye bye Tagged

I had a membership at Tagged, for quite a while. Tagged is one of the many social networking sites that are trying to hop on Facebook's bandwagon, in case you've never heard of it. It had many features that were different from Facebook, one of which was that it had a journal. If Facebook has a journal, I haven't found it yet, and I'm, sadly, on it every day.

Tagged sent me an email that seemed to try to celebrate that they were doing away with the journal on the site. I only had two entries, but to be honest, it made me want to leave. A lot of people will say it's their site, and they can do that whenever they want to, and they're correct. Tagged most certainly change its format at any time and I have no legal recourse.

The thing that these people don't understand is that journals aren't just intellectual property that needs to be protected and when removal from a domain is imminent, that the text and any photos need to be saved elsewhere. It's not just about that. Removing journals also creates dead links on countless other pages. A site finding itself in a deluge of 404 errors reduces the credibility of sites linking to those missing journal pages. Those people who had journal pages bookmarked but didn't have a membership won't know that favorite recipe they always relied on but never wrote down is gone forever now.

The people who wrote on Tagged in the journals, and interacted with other people on the site are the product that Tagged 'sells' to advertisers. Your eyes are on the page, and you see advertisements here and there on each page. The advertisers know this, and pay to be placed, where they choose, for the most part, on pages. Tagged is getting paid for you to be on different pages.

I think it's because of the new regulations about stolen content that Tagged would become responsible for if it were found on their site that prompted their decision to remove the journals feature. Websites shouldn't react like this. They only face penalties if stolen content isn't removed, much like is already required.

For me, it was too much. I wasn't very active there, so I'm sure they won't miss me much, if at all.