Microsoft Research recently launched Search together and I was really excited to read what they had to say on their research page. However, as i scrolled further I was shocked to see that they require users who download the beta to use a Windlows Live ID and IE. I mean come on, haven’t they learnt from the past! Anyways, I can go on and on about why that is bad but that is a topic for another day.
This is a pretty cool idea to search with the help and collaboration of a group of people. I can the value for students, colleagues working on the same project or even a group of industry professionals discussing and comming on a topic. From their site:
How does SearchTogether facilitate collaboration?
SearchTogether’s collaboration features include group query histories, split searching, page-level rating and commenting, automatically-generated shared summaries, peek-and-follow browsing, and integrated chat. For a more complete discussion of SearchTogether’s features, check out the tutorial.
More to follow on this once I play around with it. I first need to get my friends and colleagues to get a Windows Live ID first:)
Interesting idea but why take a walled garden approach to something called “collaborative” its seems a little ironic to me. Either way us Apple folks can not try this plugin out.