Tafiti: RIA for Specialized Search

Posted By: Joshua Allen | Aug 21st, 2007 @ 1:00 PM

Our team just released tafiti.com, an experimental interface to search that assists you in refining and researching results. Tafiti lets you stack, organize, and tag search results. It also displays a list of candidate topics you can click on to automatically refine a search result. While it can be difficult for a machine to predict subtopics, Tafiti's suggestion have been helpful to me more than once.

The news view is really nice. Some of the other features, like the tree view, feel a bit more gratuitous. Overall, it's an interesting experiment. Way cooler than MS Dewey.

Tafiti's front-end is Silverlight, and calls into Windows Live Services on the backend. Larry of Channel 10 interviewed Marc Mercuri to get a demo. You can watch the interview, or try it yourself!

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Alan Cobb

Hi Joshua,

"Some of the other features, like the tree view, feel a bit more gratuitous."

Hah! "Gratuitous" was the word that came to mind for me also regarding the "tree view" feature.

I've definitely drunk the Kool-Aid on Silverlight and RIAs in general, but on the road to the Silverlight millennium there will IMO be many individual feature experiments that quickly have a gratuitous feel.

My first reaction to that one feature was. Wow, that's pretty cool. Then 5 or 10 seconds later it was: "gratuitousness poster-child". By contrast there are other RIA examples (for example the whole Silverlight Airlines sample) that have me saying "wow, that's cool", over and over again, because the Silverlight-ness really adds value.

IMO, another example of gratuitous Silverlight animation that quickly became so annoying that today I blocked its URL with Adblock in Firefox is the "Subscribe to RSS" animation in the Silverlight forums: http://silverlight.net/forums/p/3840/11202.aspx#11202

Alan Cobb
www.alancobb.com