I've been waiting, bursting to talk about Tafiti… not only is it one of the coolest Silverlight applications I've seen, it is one of the coolest new developments in search technology. It is just wicked cool.
Let's say I want to learn a bit more about Grunge music (I missed Grunge, I was busy having kids and making a living; but I've made up for it this spring by buying every album by Nirvana, Rage Against The Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nine Inch Nails, Slayer, Smashing Pumpkins, System of A Down, Foo Fighters, Alice in Chains and quite a few others. The pleasures of OCD. And everyone else in my family hates every note. But I digress.)
To learn more about Grunge, I go to Tafiti.com (Tafiti is Swahili for Do Research) and I see a cool graphic of a spoon with my potential sources (web, books, feeds, news, images) swirling around. Meanwhile, a "drawer" opens with preliminary results (fast!) that shows short excerpts from these various sources.
I can pull out the ones I want and put them on a "shelf" that I can label "grunge" or anything else i want to label it ("mid-life crisis"), adding and removing articles, news, images as I go. When I come back, they'll all be there. I can also ask to see my results in a "tree" view which spreads the results out and lets me paw through them. There are some buttons that don't seem to work yet, but hey! it looks great and its Beta, so I'm optimistic.
Once you have a nice stack of articles, you can "blog" them (to myspaces.live.com) or you can email the stack, or just save it to peruse at your leisure.
Whether or not this is the best search vehicle ever invented I'll leave for others to determine, but it is a very cool Silverlight application, and well worth a look.
Most important, Tafiti was built with Silverlight 1.0 (and AJAX)
