The latest product release from Microsoft Live Labs lets you collect information from across the Web and share it via a link, email or a blog widget. Can Thumbtack differentiate itself from the other social bookmarking and Web clipboard services?

There are a number of notebook services similar to the newly released Thumbtack out there from Google Notebook to Evernote or Snipd. The concept is that you can collect links, pictures or other information and organize them on a clipboard for later.

Microsoft offers a number of examples of link collections that could be helpful ways to use Thumbtack like making a list of your favorite restaurants, planning a family vacation or researching your next car. You can also collaborate with a friend on finding a new apartment or anything else you might think of.

Once you’ve put a link into Thumbtack you can use Microsoft’s gadgets to pull more information from the site. Right now the gadget can extract the link’s properties, plot its location on a map, add it to a graph or remix the layout. It seems like they could have made it pull the properties automatically, but this keeps everything under the user’s control.

You can easily add sites to your Thumbtack collections using Microsoft’s bookmarklet. For the uninitiated this is just a link that you add to your bookmark toolbar. That way you can just click on the bookmark whenever you’re on a site that you want to tag and it adds the link to your collection.

Web notebooks are still a small class of innovators, so this is an excellent example of Microsoft trying to stay ahead of the curve. Unfortunately there are some kinks in the interface that could easily frustrate any user.

Sometimes the menus load strangely or hide themselves partially behind your workspace. The bookmark overlay pops up, but I had to reload the page to get it to go away. Unfortunately these quirks could be daunting to someone that is trying to use the Web in a whole new way.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 9:53 am under Microsoft, Social Media, Technology.

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