In addition to working on our own offerings, periodically we work with key partners to help them deliver new software experiences. When we work with partners we look for opportunities where we can inject some of our particular brand of user experience value as well as our technical expertise. We’re kind of picky and ultimately really like working on stuff that’s has the potential to be super interesting both in development and in application. Using their new Silverlight platform and the Live Search service we were fortunate to work with Microsoft on just such an app. We’re proud to be a part of helping bring out Tafiti.

Named for the Swahili term for research, Tafiti acknowledges that the search experience is going to get more specialized. Tafiti focuses in particular on people using search engines to do research. With built in facilities for making stacks of hand chosen web results, viewing them, and sharing them with others Tafiti starts to explore that space. There’s even a “passive search consumption feature” or as we like to call it “a screensaver” that lets you explore a set of results deeply “hands free”. :) Special nod to our friends at Section Seven for their strong effort bringing the screensaver alive. There was much more we all wanted to add to Tafiti but we were eager to start letting people start using it as quickly as possible.

Thanks to everyone at Microsoft for making us a part of this project. The search folks were full of great ideas that they’d been wanting to explore, and the Silverlight team did a great job holding our hands as we wound our way through development on their new platform. We hope you enjoy this exploration. Definitely check it out.