Custom shapes are not available for Tagul site users yet because the front-end cloud building form must be enhanced to handle it. There is a big complaint related to the building form complexity for using. So I am planning to rebuild it to make it easier to build clouds and then add custom shapes support.

BTW custom shapes are ready to be used with the API.

Here is how it works in a nutshell:

- Create a specific xml with tag cloud data
- Connect to Tagul VPN
- Send the xml to Tagul API server using XML-PRC request
- Receive cloud ID that can be used in the embedding code
or
- Receive cloud data file that can be directly passed to flash component to be rendered in real-time

API access is not free and is offered at monthly fee that depends on clouds volume being generated.

If you are interested or have any questions please contact me at support@tagul.com for more information.

Alex

Have a good luck!

You know, it costs money to develop the service and keep it running. I am not a big corporation and certainly cannot do it for charity. So eventually I am forced to monetize Tagul. I don’t have the exact monetization strategy by now, but probably it will be some mix between embedded in clouds ads and a paid subscription. Also I have a strong intention to leave it free for non-profit use.

Therefore if you consider using Tagul clouds for your enterprise please be advised.

P.S. More features are coming soon!

Stay tuned!

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.

That review attracted significant attention to the service and by this moment Tagul have virtually a hundred users signed up. Probably it is a little more attention than I expected it to be at the early stage (the service has been up just for 1 week already), but anyway it is very pleasant to get such a positive feedback.

Stay tuned!