Want to see how Microsoft’s newest — and potentially revolutionary — new product looks like? Then go to www.tafiti.com, an experimental website that is designed to rough up Google a bit for its rather dour approach to Web search, while delivering passing jolts to Adobe by leap-frogging Adobe’s Flash animations with something offering much better resolution.
Silverlight, as I wrote a few months ago, is a browser plug-in that embeds multimedia graphics in Web browsers. Note the plural here — one of Silverlight’s most revolutionary features is that it works with all major Web browsers, which Microsoft rarely does.
The Tafiti.com site (“tafiti” is a Swahili word meaning research) is a system for searching more than websites, but also images, books, news and RSS feeds. The idea is that Silverlight can create a new “experience,” as Microsoft calls it.
The general idea here is that Tafiti.com tosses up a whole bunch of search results into the air; you can then drag and store individual results onto a series of glass shelves where you can organize the results as research. The searches can be stacked on each shelf; there is a sticky-note notepad nearby, which you can click, and the results are shown in the centre of the screen on what looks like torn bits of paper, clearly an homage to packrats.
The results can then be further handled with a “Blog it” or an “E-mail it” feature.
A solar-system-like moving graphic at the bottom left allows you to click on the kind of results you want to see (Web, books, RSS and so on).
And for all you retro fans, the site (designed by Seattle-based design firm Jackson Fish Market LLC) makes the whole thing look like you’re working in a drawer in an old oak desk, with one of those metal label holders nailed on the top, with your search terms typed inside, in a font that looks comfortingly like it was tapped out on an old Underwood Upright manual typewriter.
Too bad you can get only a glimpse of it now; Tafiti.com seems to do just about everything except offer search results for all the myriad ways they can be shown. The only place you can find them is outside of the drawer, in the “tree view,” which shows a rather attenuated image of a tree with results swirling around it as though it has been caught in a slow-motion tornado.
I’m not certain yet whether the notion of swirling results, drawers in antique desks and a tree in a data storm is a good one; I tend to be a fan of solid results, and sometimes get impatient when there are too many graphics standing between me and what I want to know. In other words, I can see people not wanting a search “experience” as much as search results.
But still, Tafiti.com is really eye-catching.
