I’ve been playing with Tafiti, an attempt by Microsoft to create a new kind of user interface for internet search - and as such also an attempt to improve Microsoft’s dismal share of the internet’s search eyeballs. It’s also a showcase for Silverlight, Microsoft’s rich internet app plugin.

While I’m not convinced that replicating the look and feel of a 1950s filing cabinet is necessarily the best starting point for solving a 21st Century problem, Tafiti is nonetheless an interesting experiment. As well as the crusty filing cabinet view, there’s also an arboreal view that lets you view the search results as if they were Christmas baubles strung on the twigs of a tree.

This tree view seems to me to be the most interesting aspect of Tafiti. It reminds me a lot of other experiments I’ve seen over the years, attempts at organising large sets of data through an intuitive, three-dimensional structure.

In particular it reminds me of Galaxy of News [PDF], an MIT project from the early 1990s, which was effectively a cross between what Google News is today and a navigable version of the Starfield screen saver. One of the key participants in that project - Earl Rennison - founded a company to commercialise the work, called Perspecta. The company was sold to Excite@Home, which subsequently filed for bankruptcy and I heard no more.

Tafiti’s tree view also puts me in mind of a defunct Apple project called HotSauce, which was meant to allow users to explore their hard drive or web sites by navigating through floating labels in a 3D space. That project also went nowhere.

I wonder if the combination of today’s desktops and our current web infrastructure have finally caught up with where Rennison et al needed to be to make Galaxy of News properly fly. It always struck me as a great concept dreamed up a decade before its time.