go forth and do research

There are some great things about working for Microsoft. Yes, really. One of the great things about working here is dogfood. While dogfood might not sound appetizing, it really is quite nifty. Microsoft has a strong corporate culture of 'eating your own dogfood' -- that is, using the stuff that we're going to unleash onto the masses. We can't expect you to use it if we don't use it ourselves.

The practical upshot of this is, I get to use Microsoft technologies before other people do. I get early access to some cool stuff. One of the things that I've been playing with for a couple of weeks now has just been released out into the wild: Tafiti. It's a Silverlight-based front end for our search engine.

Since they're using Silverlight, they're able to have a pretty interesting user experience. There's a filter on the right side of the page for types of results (books, RSS feeds, news, images, etc). On the left, there's a shelf where you can drag interesting search results to keep them. There's a tree view to visualise your results, and you can grow or shrink the tree to show less or more of the results. It's a really well-done effect. When I first heard about it, I thought that I wouldn't like it because it would be too busy, but it looks nice and proves helpful when looking at some results.

I'm not sure if Tafiti is going to replace my usual searching. But I have been using it relatively frequently for the past couple of weeks, so maybe I'll find that it does fit a need for me. I see that there's a podcast on Channel 9 about platform incubation and Tafiti, so I'll go add that to my listening queue.

Oh, in case you're curious about the name Tafiti, it's Swahili for 'do research'. It's making me want to research a holiday in Tahiti. How much vacation time do I have left this year?

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 22, 2007
  meh. Too much UI effects, too many things to keep track of. I like www.ninja.com. Now that's a clean UI.