Note: You will need to install Silverlight in order to use tafiti.  (included)

The first thing you notice about tafiti is the very plain homepage. Here’s tafiti.

Just a sheet of ruled paper for a search box.  But type in your query and hit enter…

and you’ll see your web results in the center of the page, and this little “lazy Susan” in the bottom left corner.  Click on the RSS icon, and you get feeds about your topic.

Click on the tiny picture frame icon, and you get images…

Click on the book, and you get books (that you can search inside!).

Click on the newspaper and you’ll get all news items on your topic.

And here’s the “piece of resistance,” click on a tree icon, and instead of a boxed tag cloud, you get a “tag tree.”  Move your mouse to a leaf, and a text box opens. 

The good news is that tafiti is brought to you by the same people that created Ms. Dewey – MSN.

The bad news is that tafiti is brought to you by the same people that created Ms. Dewey – MSN.

In other words, the graphics for tafiti and Ms. Dewey are state-of-the-art; they’re very slick (and slow to load!). But in both cases it quickly becomes apparent that the results are just the same old MSN results.  It’s like an expensive slipcover on an old sofa, it looks great – until you sit on it.

You see, with KoolTorch, Quintura & KartOO, and Kosmix, the dramatically different  interfaces are not just window dressing, they are both novel and -this is the key- functional.  Clustering and Visualization and Categorization don’t simply look nice, they also let the user do something new.

I am not the first to say this, but this is why Ms. Dewey and tafiti will eventually fade away, because the novelty will eventually wear off like a Christmas toy in March.  Once your buddies say, “Oh yeah, we’ve seen Ms. Dewey,” why go back?  Once everyone has seen the “tag tree,” they will lose interest in it. 

Just remember the “Big 3″ U.S. automakers.  After a certain point, each new model started to look pretty much like last year’s model.  The more massive a company becomes, the less innovative it becomes, too.  It’s hard to do figure 8’s in a cruise ship!  Innovation comes from the start-ups (read: Japanese imports). 

For me, it’s still the Alternative search engines that keep me glued to my laptop.

I hope you enjoy tafiti, and I think you should try it out. 

But tomorrow I’ll show you something else…

What’s in a name?  Well,  apparently “tafiti” means “to do research” in Swahili! 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 6:54 pm and is filed under Innovations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.