Microsoft Thumbtack

» see thumbtack.livelabs.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Microsoft Live Labs introduced Thumbtack on Wednesday 10 December 2008. The one-line description in the trade press that day was that it let users collect snippets of information from websites and share the collections with others, which undersold it. Thumbtack saved the full text of a page rather than a link to it, dragged into collections you could keep private or publish as a small website of their own. Behind the drag and drop it ran machine learning and natural language processing to work out what each thing was and file it accordingly.

That was a larger claim than its competitors were making. Del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia were storing your URLs and your tags, and your tags were doing the organizing. Thumbtack proposed to read what you saved and sort it for you, and it shipped REST APIs and feeds so other software could get at the result. On paper it is closer to what Microsoft would launch a decade later as Collections in Edge.

In practice it had the usual research-project edges. A reviewer that December found the bookmarklet choked on pages built around JavaScript or video, returning a garbled mix of text and code, and noted that some features simply did not work in Firefox. It lived at thumbtack.livelabs.com, which is a URL you only reach if you already read Microsoft research announcements.

~ the record ~

~ the lab ~

Live Labs was founded on 24 January 2006 as a joint venture between MSN and Microsoft Research, run by Gary William Flake, who had come over from Yahoo's research lab. Its job was applied research, which meant shipping real products at real URLs with no obligation to keep them. Seadragon, Photosynth, Pivot, Listas and Volta all came out of the same group, and most of them are gone. Microsoft closed Live Labs on 8 October 2010 and moved the remaining 68 people to Bing; Flake resigned.

Thumbtack died about eleven months before the lab that made it. The last capture of a working front page is 19 September 2009, and by the time anyone wrote about its absence the archive had stopped visiting. Living on a corporate research subdomain for under a year usually means leaving nothing behind outside the English-language technology press, and this one almost managed it. The exception is still sitting in the archive. On 15 December 2008, five days after launch, a user called alpcoker had a public Thumbtack collection titled paylaşılacaklar, which is Turkish for "things to be shared". Somebody in my language found a Microsoft research experiment inside a week and started filing links into it, and that page outlasted the service by sixteen years because a crawler happened to walk past.

~ still inviting you in ~

There is no shutdown notice for this one, no letter, no thirty-day export window. The only death certificate is a short post by Glenn Fleishman on 3 November 2009 at 9:19 in the morning, on a blog he was keeping specifically to catalog hosted services as they died. He notes that the service let you save all manner of things in a single place for later retrieval, that because this was a lab experiment nothing was guaranteed, and then delivers the detail that makes it a story: "If you go to the ThumbTack site today, it still encourages you to sign up--and directs you to a dead site."

Somebody had switched off the service and left the front door standing open, with the welcome mat out and the sign still up. Whoever was supposed to take the page down had presumably been moved to another team.

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