If you dismissed Microsoft Silverlight as a technology you didn’t need to track, you might want to go over to http://tafiti.com – Microsoft’s brand new search engine interface written in Silverlight.
I happened across this item at Techno//Marketer (thanks Matt!). Matt Dickman does a very nice job on a screencast walking tafiti (which means “do research” in Swahili) through it’s paces.
While tafiti is very much a beta and broken in parts, the interface makes searching across the web, RSS, images, news and more dirt simple and fun. You click one of the icons on the left, see the results and can drag items off to the drawer on the right. There’s an alternative treeview interface that is pulling up a load of microISV links I’ve not seen in a way that make it easy to browse for items that catch your eye and open them in separate browser windows.
Now is this anything more than a pretty eye candy interface on Microsoft’s search web services? Nope. But its a really cool interface – and if they hammer out the bugs it might, maybe, give you a reason to try Microsoft Live Search. I would be very interested in seeing tafiti for Google.
And by the way – Matt reviewed tafiti on his PC naturally enough, and wasn’t wild about the fact that like using Flash on a new PC, Silverlight had to be installed. When I went to tafiti.com, that install took 20 seconds. That was on my MacBook Pro.
From tafiti’s FAQ:
“Tafiti is a Silverlight application and supports all currently supported platforms for that technology.
On Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2, this includes Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, Windows Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.8, and Firefox 2.0.x.
On Apple Mac OS X this includes Firefox 1.5.0.8, Firefox 2.0.x, and Apple Safari 2.0.4.”
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Did you see http://www.quintura.com? It looks quite similar.
Your link doesn’t work. You need to go to http://www.tafiti.com to actually get to the site.
http://tafiti.com/ (the link in the post) works just fine Kedge. Perhaps it was down when you tried it.
I figured it out, it’s a server-doesn’t-like-firefox thing. Without “www.” firefox prompts for a user name then gives you a standard access denied page from iis when you click cancel. This doesn’t happen on the “www.” site, and with IE it doesn’t matter which one you hit.
Unimpressive.
A. It’s slow. It took 15 seconds to bring up the UI, and this on a completely idle quad core box with 2GB ram and a T3 internet connection.
B. It forced a browser reboot even though I already have a full .Net 3.0 installed.
C. Its scrolling behavior is less than smart.
D. It drew the yellow sticky notes off screen and did not add a horizontal scroll bar to get to them (and my browser windows was already 900 pixels wide).
E. The UI is twitchy and visually disconcerting.
F. Google produced better results in far less time.
G. Its esthetically ugly. Its a mish-mash of 1930′s desktop and modern soft graphics.
In summary, its “cute,” but there’s no steak with this sizzle. There have been some very compelling .Net 3.0 applications, but this isn’t one of them.
Bob — Thanks for the link and I’m glad you liked the video. I run a MacBook Pro as well and had about the same install time as you. I just think that it’s a stretch to make people install another plugin when Flash does nearly the same thing from a UI standpoint. Nice summary post!