Microsoft Live Labs is releasing Thumbtack, an easy way to gather and share links, photos, and text, from different Web sites and save all of the data in the form of a collection to a single place at: http://thumbtack.livelabs.com/. Thumbtack allows users to share and collaborate with others on collections by providing the ability to directly email the content or by allowing them to publish their collection to the Web with a number of options including RSS, Atom, HTML and Internet Explorer 8 Web Slices. Thumbtack collections can also be embedded in personal websites and blogs.

In addition, Thumbtack includes gadgets which enhance and extend the capabilities of Thumbtack and enable people to do more with their content, such as compare different items by price or location or automatically find and map addresses. Clips within Thumbtack can also be annotated with properties and then viewed as a scatter plot or bar graph to help sort, filter and visualize content within a collection.

The team incorporated ideas from the community feedback of the Listas tech preview, which Live Labs released in the fall of 2007. Thumbtack focuses on ways to seamlessly collect and organize information gathered from across the web. Similar to other technology preview releases from Microsoft Live Labs, the team will evaluate user feedback to determine the best places to move forward on Thumbtack, including better ways of collecting clips to further analyze the rich metadata to better support visualization and decision making.

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