The NewsDemon Blog

Microsoft Thumbstack

Microsoft’s Live Labs has just released Thumbtack, a web clipping service that allows users to compile links, media, and text snippets into online storage bins for future reference. Users can also share their Thumbtack collections with their peers, allowing them to collaborate by adding new clips and notations.

According to Microsoft, Thumbtack was developed based on user feedback the company received after releasing Listas in 2007. Unlike Listas, however, Thumbtack does not focus on social bookmarking but rather on creating online research collections. Thumbtack supports both IE7 and Firefox, though Firefox users miss out an a few interesting features.

Thumbtack is an “easy way to gather and share links, photos, and text, from different Web sites and save all of the data in the form of a collection to a single place,” a Microsoft spokesperson stated. “Thumbtack allows users to share and collaborate with others on collections, by providing the ability to directly email the content or by allowing them to publish their collection to the Web with a number of options including RSS, Atom, HTML, and Internet Explorer 8 Web Slices. Thumbtack collections can also be embedded in personal websites and blogs.”

At this point in time Microsoft is not ready to reveal the direction in which it will take Thumbtack, as the Live Labs incubation projects are essentially designed to test ideas and technologies, more than actual solutions. In this regard, users familiar with Live Labs will notice similarities between the new tool and concepts tested with the Listas Technology Preview.

You can find more information on Listas and Thumbstack on Newsgroups:

microsoft.public.deployment
microsoft.public.design
microsoft.public.developer
microsoft.public.development
microsoft.public.applicationcenter
microsoft.public.access