Thumbtack works in Internet Explorer and Firefox, but it lacks some features when used in Firefox, Microsoft said.

The concept behind the service is reminiscent of , a Microsoft Research project that lets people collaborate on searches by sharing links and comments about the links with other people.

It's also similar in concept to Mozilla's Joey, a defunct project that let people copy and paste portions of Web pages onto a single page that they could access from their mobile phones or another computer.

Thumbtack is also like other available services, including Google Notebook. But Thumbtack developers think their service has a difference. "Thumbtack stands apart in its ability to introspect on incoming data in order to automatically classify it and extract structure from it using machine learning," according to the about the service.

In addition, Thumbtack offers users more freedom, in that they can arrange content on a page any way they like, the FAQ notes.