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Thumbtack improving on bookmarks + A Thumbtack collection on Microsoft's Data Centers

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(NOTE: Removed links as the Thumbtack experiment has ended... the service is no longer available. -JohnM, October 27, 2009).    

Thumbtack is a handy little resource for organizing and sharing information you find on the web into collections.  Of course, bookmarks already provide a rudimentary way to organize things you find online, and sites like Del.ico.us, favorites.live.com, and others provide a way to share your bookmarks. 

Bookmarks and bookmark sharing services are cool, but they are fundamentally limited by the web page paradigm... and increasingly web pages are not the primary boundary for content on the web.  Similarly, we have all seen web pages where a snippet of content is especially interesting but the page as a whole isn’t. 

So the folks over at LiveLabs are exploring how to move past the page-level boundaries that bookmarks enforce, as well as how to make the sharing of content we discover online even better.   They call their experiment "Thumbtack".  You can try it out at Thumbtack.livelabs.com. 

I just tried it myself yesterday, and I found it takes a little getting used to.  But once I acquainted myself with the basic metaphors of the site it's very powerful.  As a way to learn about the service I decided to create and publish a collection of information on Microsoft's Data Centers. 

This particular collection includes whole web pages (bookmarks), snippets of text, links, and images grabbed from the various sites, and also text that I've directly typed or pasted into "clips".  Clips are the organizing metaphor for content in Thumbtack.  Each clip that I added directly was originally a separate bullet point in an email of publicly sharable information that I received from a member of the Global Foundation Services team (the people that run Microsoft's data centers).  You can tell these clips from the ones I found online because there is no link within the clip. 

To make grabbing content into clips easy, Thumbtack provides an easy to use bookmarklet and IE8 accelerator.  The bookmarklet works best to include a full web page in a clip.  To add only a piece of content from a web page into a clip, simply highlight the content you want in your clip and select “Collect with Thumbtack” from the Accelerator list and you’re done.  This works with both text and images, and also preserves any links associated with the selected content. 

In addition to clips, you can add gadgets to a Thumbtack collection.  These are little bundles of functionality that pertain to your clips.  For example, if you have addresses in your collection of clips, adding a mapping gadget will automatically show the addresses on a Virtual Earth map in a special area on the side of your screen.  There are also gadgets for different clip layouts, editing the properties of clips, and even for automatically plotting data contained within clips into a chart.  Cool!

The sharing feature is also notable.  Of course, sending a link to a collection by email is one option.  But there’s also a handy embed option.  Here’s a direct link to my Thumbtack collection at the Thumbtack site, and I’ve also embedded the collection below.  If you’d like to try thumbtack yourself, check it out at https://thumbtack.livelabs.com/ .  

And enjoy the Thumbtack collection on Microsoft’s Data Centers!

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Live Labs,Thumbtack,innovation

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