We’re all pretty familiar with tagging people on sites like Facebook and Flickr. It’s a great way to let the people who are in the pictures know you’ve uploaded shots of them, and it’s also a good way for others to see who the persons are in the photos they’re looking at.
But what if you’d rather steer clear of the walled gardens of the Web and upload photos to your own website or blog? Wouldn’t it be useful to be able to tag those, too?
Enter Stipple, a recently launched startup that lets you tag images across the entire Web (see example on BritneySpears.com). The company is today launching People Dots, a feature that allows users to build a bridge between Stipple and their Twitter and/or Facebook accounts.
If Stipple is enabled for your website or blogging platform, which requires placement of a small snippet of code, you can upload photos to your site or blog like you’re used to. Using an inline editor, you can use People Dots to quickly label your friends.
Their ‘dots’ will then show their names, along with a link to either their Twitter or Facebook profile. That way, visitors will be able to click through to that person’s account to connect with or follow him or her (it also shows the person’s latest tweet if applicable).
The editor also boasts auto-complete functionality that that pulls from your list of friends, making it even smoother to add “people dots”.
Also cool: when you label your buddies with Stipple’s People Dots, you can opt to send notifications to the persons in question. This can be in the form of a Facebook status update or via a tweet posted to your own Twitter account, including a mention of the “dotted” person. Notifications are enabled by default but can easily be switched off.
Very cool if you ask me and very well executed – going to enjoy playing around with this one.
