Microsoft tacks on not-so-social bookmarking tool

Hot on the heels of launching its Web news-tracking service Political Streams, the Live Labs team at Microsoft has released a tool called Thumbtack. Similar to Listas, a previous Microsoft Live Labs project, Thumbtack lets users grab chunks of information from Web pages and store it in the cloud.

These chunks of information can be tagged and strewn about canvas pages as self contained ecosystems of content. Users can go in to edit them at any time and invite others to view their work. There is, however, no real-time collaboration, meaning that your collection can be shared, but not worked on at the same time.

With Thumbtack, Microsoft seems to have learned that not everyone uses Internet Explorer. To that end, the company now provides a bookmarklet that lets users grab Web content, marking a step forward from Listas' use of an installed toolbar. It gives users the option to tag and preview content before sending it to Microsoft's servers.

The big caveat is that there's no support for Google's Chrome browser and minimal support for Firefox. Mozilla users miss out on the special IE-only canvas view mode, which lets them maneuver their notes around a virtual workspace. Non-IE users are also unable to use the copy function, which lets them temporarily put an entire Thumbtack stack in their clipboard before pasting it into another collection.

Users are given an unlimited amount of storage, which is something that might change, once the service leaves its "technology preview" status. The application handles full-resolution photos from the Web, and Microsoft says video compatibility is coming in a later version.

I worry that Microsoft is introducing Thumbtack at a bad time. There are already a handful of Web social-clipping services that I think do this with far more ease for the end user. More notably Evernote and FriendFeed, both of which have much more intuitive bookmarklets and simpler organizational methods. Worse yet, this isn't taking advantage of Microsoft's existing, and recently revamped, Live services, which lets users store their stuff and interact with each other. This is simply giving them yet another bucket in which to store information.

To Microsoft's credit, moving away from requiring Internet Explorer to really make use of one of its services is a step forward, albeit with removal of two of its most helpful elements--the canvas view, and copy and paste.

If you're curious, here's an overview of how it works:

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:6a905d98-0332-4c3f-8b25-75737cd9b675&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Thumbtack Introduction">Video: Thumbtack Introduction</a>

[Penguinisto]

One big, fat question: How do they (the users) avoid copyright issues?

[Vegaman_Dan]

Probably the same way that Google, Yahoo, Apple, Facebook, and others do- with a EULA.

[Penguinisto]

Well, sure - but wasn't it Microsoft who got all snarky about IP issues (both real and imagined)? I'm curious as to how they intend to enforce it, mostly because they've been among the louder in the industry about IP issues.

[t8]

Wow, another innovation from Microsoft.
I am so not impressed.

[Super2online]

Would you be impressed if Google or Apple or the open source community had introduced it, or is this just the usual biased entry we see from you? Try not to be so transparent, and we might be able to give your comments a little more credibility.

[t8]

Yes I probably would, mainly because it would have been done on a low budget and so the output would be higher.

[rapier1]

I think its important to note that this is a technology demonstration at this point - which is why its coming from LiveLabs.

[michael_in_philly]

Gee, I was hoping for a real business tool. HEY MICROSOFT, you should check out corepage.com. If I want anti-social bookmarking (private web pages from existing web content, actually), I'll use this.

I use a bunch of other bookmarking tools too, but this is the most business oriented I've seen.

Full Disclosure: a friend of mine worked on it.