Thumbtack is a new project, developed under the Microsoft Live Labs umbrella and designed to provide a centralized location where users can collect, save, manage and share information from all over the web. All data “items,” from headlines to blog posts to entire articles, and additional forms of content including photos are added to Thumbtack in clips, with the users subsequently having the option to organize, edit, and share the chunks of information gathered while navigating. Thumbtack is offering storage in the cloud for all Thumbtack clips, which can be organized in collections in accordance with subject, date, or characteristics.

Thumbtack is an “easy way to gather and share links, photos, and text, from different Web sites and save all of the data in the form of a collection to a single place,” a Microsoft spokesperson revealed to Softpedia. “Thumbtack allows users to share and collaborate with others on collections, by providing the ability to directly email the content or by allowing them to publish their collection to the Web with a number of options including RSS, Atom, HTML, and Internet Explorer 8 Web Slices. Thumbtack collections can also be embedded in personal websites and blogs.”

Coming to the table with support for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3, Thumbtack can be used as both a standalone tool, but also enhanced with gadgets, Microsoft explained. Gadgets have the role of adding capabilities when it comes down to the options associated with the content stored in Thumbtack. By default, users can create multiple collections and view items on separate canvases, filtering the content in accordance with a variety of properties that they can specify.

At this point in time Microsoft is not ready to reveal the direction in which it will take Thumbtack, as the Live Labs incubation projects are essentially designed to test ideas and technologies, more than actual solutions. In this regard, users familiar with Live Labs will notice similarities between the new tool and concepts tested with the Listas Technology Preview.

“The team incorporated ideas from the community feedback of the Listas tech preview, which Live Labs released in the fall of 2007. Thumbtack focuses on ways to seamlessly collect and organize information gathered from across the web. Similar to other technology preview releases from Microsoft Live Labs, the team will evaluate user feedback to determine the best places to move forward on Thumbtack, including better ways of collecting clips to further analyze the rich metadata to better support visualization and decision making,” the Microsoft spokesperson added.