Yesterday, Live Labs launched a project called Thumtack. The project is an exploration of a collection metaphor for information objects found on the web. It supports the grouping and analysis of objects and the sharing and collaboration of these collections with different communities. Steve Drucker, whose voice you will hear on the Thumbtack video, has been working in this area for a while as a principal scientist hear at Live Labs specializing in the area of HCI and UX/UI.
For me, in addition to the social aspects of the project, the most exciting thing about this area in general is the fundamental change in how it views information presented on the web: from a collection of pages linked by hyperlinks to an underlying space of information articulated via online resources (including web pages). The revolution, when it comes, will be a result of this shift in how we think about web published data and any project (Live Labs or otherwise) that starts behavioural change is well worth the investment.
So this is pretty much a Silverlight, Microsoft version of Google Notebook? It's exactly the same, down to the drag&drop, except Google did it using only Javascript and their UI is not as nice.
Posted by: Dmitriy | December 11, 2008 at 10:39 PM
Actually, it's not Silverlight. It's Javascript, too.
Posted by: Dmitriy | December 11, 2008 at 10:42 PM