Microsoft Thumbtack dabbles with social bookmarking

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 11 Dec 2008 at 10:30

Microsoft is staking its claim in the social-bookmarking space with a new service called Thumbtack.

The Microsoft Live Labs venture allows users to clip parts of webpages and paste them into Thumbtack, allowing them to build collections on specific themes.

You could, for example, clip together reviews of netbooks or details of favourite restaurants in London.

Once collated, the collections can then be shared with other Thumbtack users or published on a web page hosted by Microsoft.

Thumbtack works in both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3, although users of the Mozilla browser aren't given the full arsenal of display features granted to people using IE.

Thumbtack also includes a "Bookmarklet" that allows users to easily clip pages they are currently visiting by clicking on a link in their bookmarks toolbar. This produced erratic results in our brief tests, however, with Thumbtack struggling to retain the formatting of websites clipped in this method.

Thumbtack is now in public beta, although you'll need a Windows Live account to sign up.