Microsoft Thumbtack – Create your own online bulletin board

Posted on December 21, 2008 at 5:35 am

If you browse the web a lot and tend to copy and paste tidbits of webpages onto your computer for future reference, you probably are in need of a good online notebook or online web clippings organizer.

I’ve previously written about several of these, including Google Notebook, Evernote, Listas, and Clipmarks. Depending on what features you like or don’t like, all of them are good choices.

Thumbtack by Microsoft Live Labs takes the idea of an online notebook/list maker and makes it more into a bulletin board where you can “tack” objects, such as web pages, text, photos, etc, onto a blank board and then share it with others.

For anything that you are interested in, you can create collections, which can include links, photos, text, web pages, and more. You can then easily share these collections with others and use it as a collaboration tool. The people you share it with can add their own objects to the board also.

So what can this be useful for other than collecting some interesting tidbits from the web?

Collect a list of your favorite hang out places in your city and share it with your friends so they can add to the list
Plan a trip with family or friends and collect information about lodging, events, maps, etc.
Research an item you are planning to buy by collecting information on prices, features, options, etc.

To get started using Thumbtack, simply copy and paste a portion of a webpage into a new collection.

You can then create new collections to better organize your web clippings.

You can also install the Thumbtack bookmarklet so that you can collection web clippings while you are browsing the web. The other nifty feature of Thumbtack is that they have four gadgets that you can add to your collections, which will perform different actions.

For example, the Address gadget will automatically map all addresses that you put into your collections. The other gadgets are Plot, Layout, and Properties.

You can also search items in all of your collections using the search box at the top right. So if you have lots and lots of content and many collections, don’t worry, everything will be easy to find as long as you can remember a word or two about what you want to find.

Other cool features include the ability to share a single item or an entire collection with others. You can publish a collection and it will get its own URL that you can then send out to anyone. You can also embed a collection into your blog of website.

Also, an RSS feed is created for each collection, so other people can subscribe to your collection via RSS! That’s pretty cool. Overall, it’s got a very nice visual interface and some nifty features that make it better than all the other online notebook services out there. Enjoy! [via DownloadSquad]

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