Recently Jonathan Feinberg, the creator of Wordle wrote a blog post about Tagul. If you don’t know Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” that are very similar to Tagul. In this post I am going to explain the difference between Tagul and Wordle and expose the motives that led to Tagul creation.

At first, I don’t like being mentioned as a person “who identifies himself only as Alex”. I admit there is a lack of info about me so far and therefore I am going to spot some light on my bio.

Bio

I was born in 1982 in Moscow, Russia. So I am 27 years old at the moment of writing this post and still located there. I am keen on computers since childhood. My first programming experience was altering BASIC code on an Atari computer to get more lives in an action game . I was 10 years old then. Later on I got Master’s degree on computer science from Moscow State University. Despite my loving programming I have never worked as a programmer. My latest position is a business analyst in a bank. I am married and have a wonderful 2 years old son.

A story behind Tagul

Having that said, I felt unsatisfied in my professional life being an employee of a bank. It was quite far from technology and real challenge. So I desided to try myself as an entrepreneur in the internet area, as it was the easiest way for a person with programming skills. I spent some time looking for a great idea to implement and once I noticed that there were a lot of tag clouds in the internet, but virtually all of them were ugly and didn’t look like clouds at all. So I decided to make a web service that would enable users to create true tag clouds. Here is an example of my early work:
Then I found Wordle and was amazed by its capability of placing text inside text. I was inspired by this idea so much, so I decided to implement it in Tagul. It was a tough task but I did it. It takes me a year of hard work in my spare time (free from full time job) to implement the idea from scratch to early beta stage where Tagul is now. Here is an example of a modern Tagul cloud:

Tagul is different

Wordle was designed to be just a toy. Wordle clouds cannot be used as in the way tag clouds are usually used, like being embedded on a web page and serving as navigation units. That leaves the niche that Tagul is intended to fulfil. Tagul clouds are not toys and designed to be used on blogs, web pages or any kind of sites as a replacement of ordinary tag clouds. Each tag in Tagul cloud is linked with an URL and is “clickable” that enables visitors to use it for navigation. Also Tagul utilizes widely used flash platform (instead of less common java platform in Wordle) that is light weight (~50kb per cloud vs ~150kb) and stores the clouds on a CDN to deliver clouds to wide audience instanlty. Tagul has some features that Wordle doesn’t, like custom shapes selection and multiply fonts usage in one cloud. Finally, Tagul is a startup and I am going to make a profit on this venture some day.

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