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Microsoft's Thumbtack, an Answer To Google Notebook
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."
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?
Seriously. Whats next? Windows 7 will feature a task bar at the top of the screen with a magnifying shortcut bar at the bottom of the screen?
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
From TFA:
Thumbtack works in Internet Explorer and Firefox, but it lacks some features when used in Firefox, Microsoft said.
So the Firefox extension lacks the "Share" or "Publish" ability, right?
There is no knowledge that is not power.
Oh, how cute! Clippy's got a cousin.
I bet Thumby's classification of information works just as well as Clippy's classification of my current action.
I thought Microsoft was against the "theft" (infringement) of Intellectual "Property" (assets).
So does that mean their product is a pain in the ass?
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.
Even the thought of office stationery in relation to Microsoft brings back those horrible nightmares...
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
Microsoft Thumbscrew! The product guaranteed to make you scream in agony! Now with even more boneheaded user interface design decisions! Order now, and we'll somehow work in DRM and the Internet Explorer rendering engine, too!
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
Microsoft have woken up to the threat of Google, and the fact that Google have caught Microsoft with their pants down on several new revenue models. They assume "if Google are doing it, then we need to". Every competing service they do, to try and take share away from Google fails. They want to buy Yahoo (or parts of it) to buy that marketshare where they failed to get it with their own services. They seem oblivious to the fact that their products and services have to be forced on people, that most people don't choose the Microsoft service when they do have a choice.
Funny, I thought all those long words meant, "We are searching your notes so that we know what advertisements to cram down your throat."
Note - Liberal use of <sarcasm> tags may or may not need to be applied.
May be someone should try to steganalyse these trolls. I cannot believe, there is a guy typing so much content, which is of no use for anyone reading it or himself.
The citation is missing. Can someone verify that this is true? Why is Microsoft competing against a project that Google is dropping?
P.s. Can someone who knows more about this topic fix the Wikipedia page? Thanks!
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.
This is how Al-Qaeda communicates. There, I typed Al-Qaeda so this will be thoroughly analyzed by some sort of government agency.