Hot on the heels of launching its Web news-tracking service Political Streams, the Live Labs team at Microsoft has released a tool called Thumbtack. Similar to Listas, a previous Microsoft Live Labs project, Thumbtack lets users grab chunks of information from Web pages and store it in the cloud.
These chunks of information can be tagged and strewn about canvas pages as self contained ecosystems of content. Users can go in to edit them at any time and invite others to view their work. There is, however, no real-time collaboration, meaning that your collection can be shared, but not worked on at the same time.
With Thumbtack, Microsoft seems to have learned that not everyone uses Internet Explorer. To that end, the company now provides a bookmarklet that lets users grab Web content, marking a step forward from Listas' use of an installed toolbar. It gives users the option to tag and preview content before sending it to Microsoft's servers.