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Microsoft's Thumbtack, an Answer To Google Notebook

Posted by timothy on from the portal-of-calls dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft's Live Labs have introduced a new service that lets users collect snippets of information from Web sites and share the collections with others. It's similar in concept to Mozilla's Joey, a defunct project that let people copy and paste portions of Web pages onto a single page that they could access from their mobile phones or another computer. Thumbtack is also like other available services, including Google Notebook. But Thumbtack developers think their service has a difference. 'Thumbtack stands apart in its ability to introspect on incoming data in order to automatically classify it and extract structure from it using machine learning,' according to the FAQ about the service."

10 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. I think an important question here is... by woot+account · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Does anybody really use services like this? I'm only vaguely aware of the Google Notebook feature by virtue of accidentally clicking on it from time to time.

    So, if you use it... how/why?

    --
    By what name do you wish to be mourned?
    1. Re:I think an important question here is... by jonaskoelker · · Score: 2, Insightful

      > When I have something interesting to paste or write down, and am too lazy to start up my text editor, I use Google Notebook.

      Let's see: (C-M-c is xterm, thanks to xbindkeys)

      C-M-c v i C-j i S-ins ESC : w q
      1     2 3 4   5 6     7   8 9 A

      C-t n o t e b o o k . g o o g l e . c o m
      1   2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A FAIL

      Do the math ;)

    2. Re:I think an important question here is... by Elektroschock · · Score: 2, Insightful

      But why would you want to get the same tool from Microsoft?

    3. Re:I think an important question here is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I'll do the math if you do the sociology: no-one in their right mind uses incomprehensible shortcuts over relatively straightforward and user-friendly GUIs. You can bind keys to xterm and type away in obscure shorthand until the cows come home, but it's just not a viable solution for the rest of the world.

      Also, Google Notebook is accessible from a Firefox plug-in:

      leftclick leftclick C-v leftclick
      1 2 3 4

      But go ahead. Continue to use your paradigm, and I'll use mine.

  2. Copy and paste websites? by ustolemyname · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Wholesale copying, pasting, and sharing of websites?

    I thought Microsoft was against the "theft" (infringement) of Intellectual "Property" (assets).

    1. Re:Copy and paste websites? by WTF+Chuck · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Only when they can't harvest info to make a buck with.

      --
      Note - Liberal use of <sarcasm> tags may or may not need to be applied.
  3. Microsoft will Remain Second Rate Player on Web by nysus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    FTA: "Thumbtack works in Internet Explorer and Firefox, but it lacks some features when used in Firefox, Microsoft said."

    Microsoft just doesn't get it. If you can't get your service to work with all major browsers, your service is going to be seen as inferior, not the browser.

    And apparently, Microsoft thinks people like being forced to use their software. Well, guess what? They don't. They resent it. It's not 1999 anymore. People now understand AOL is not synonymous with the Internet and Microsoft is not synonymous with software.

    --

    ---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.

    1. Re:Microsoft will Remain Second Rate Player on Web by darrylo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I agree.

      Google Notebook is also the wrong target. While it's useful, I think it's something of a niche feature these days, as other online services seem to be passing it by. Even Google buries it in the "even more" submenu.

      If Microsoft really wanted to get noticed, they should have taken the organizational and editing features of OneNote, and combined them with the distributed synchronization and text/image/online/offline searching of Evernote. That would have been a killer product.

      I used to be a Google Notebook user, but I'm now a 100% Evernote fan. I took everything that I had in GN, and dumped them into Evernote, which is something like a personal google. Nowadays, I don't use tags. I let the note text and web snippets be the defacto tags, and just do text searches. I even moved all of my del.icio.us bookmarks into Evernote. (Sharing/collaboration can be an issue, as notebooks are either 100% private or 100% public -- you can't just share to a few people.) Evernote also works on PCs, Macs, web browsers, and the iPhone.

    2. Re:Microsoft will Remain Second Rate Player on Web by Joe+Jay+Bee · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Webmasters have no obligations to cater to a particular browser.

      If this was said about Firefox, I'd be able to hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth from a million miles away. Won't fly.

      --
      I write bullshit
  4. Don't NEED to remember the name.... by macraig · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Have you heard of Google, I presume? You know what its primary service does, right? Did you also know that you can apply that index-and-search paradigm to locally stored content on a single personal computer? No fewer than two (actually many more) products have actually done it:

    Microsoft: Windows Indexing Service and Windows Desktop Search
    Google: Google Desktop Search

    With these devices, when properly installed and used, you don't need to remember the name of a file: all you need to recall is some relevant fact about the file, whether it's a snippet of the file name or something from within its (textual) content.

    Believe it or not, Microsoft's product is actually far more effective at this task, once all the available third-party "IFilters" are installed on top of it. On my system, WDS recognizes and indexes text and hints from about three times more files than GDS, which amounts to literally hundreds of thousands more files.

    In this case, at least, it's Google Desktop Search that performs more poorly at the primary task. Google wasted too much effort on the froofy "widgets" and other unnecessary crap, and apparently failed to open up the spec so that interested parties could create the equivalents of IFilters for it.