Mytago: A Real/Online World Bridge

Like Mozes, Mytago is trying to find an easy way for people to tag real world stuff for interaction online.

The idea is to create a visual tag (see image) that can be included on a website or, more usefully, somewhere offline like a poster. People who view the Mytago tag can take a picture of it with their camera phone and email or upload it to Mytago. Whatever metadata is associated with the Mytago tag will be bookmarked on the user’s account. In lieu of taking a picture of the image, users can just email in the code that’s included with the tag.

Stats are available for each tag, so the creator can see how many people have bookmarked it. And users can comment on any tag.

Is Mytago a winner? I don’t think so. Given how easy it is to put up a website, I don’t know why people wouldn’t just put up a site with whatever information they like, and include a web address in their offline poster or other stuff.

I’m writing about it because I like the experimentation, and Mytago caught my eye. I think the Mozes solution, which addresses this market in a different way and without any requirement for a visual tag, may have legs. My review of Mozes is here.

Update: Nana and Mark Devlin left comments that talk about QR Codes in use in Japan that look very similar to Mytago tags and that are readable by cell phones. Having the ability to have your phone directly understand the code makes all of this stuff more interesting. We’ll see if/when we get something like this in the U.S.