Right before the holidays, I saw down with Marc Mercuri to discuss the recently released Tafiti Windows Live Quick Application and how it evolved from one of Marc’s recent incubation projects. The interview just went live this morning on Channel9; you can find it here.

In the interview, Marc describes the journey from Tafiti, the incubation project, to the Tafiti Quick App. In case you're not familiar with Tafiti or the Quick Apps:

• Tafiti is an experimental search front-end from Microsoft that uses Silverlight and Live Search to provide a rich specialized search experience on the Web. 
• The Windows Live Quick Applications are a set of samples that illustrate how to combine multiple Windows Live platform offerings to implement specific Web scenarios. Each Quick App is offered as a source code download, and you can use the code as-is, you can re-purpose it, copy code snippets from it, or use it as a learning tool.

Big thanks to Angus Logan who drove this effort, working with Marc and others to convert the incubation project into a Quick App.  Angus announced the release of the Quick App in this blog entry. (In case you didn't already know, Angus's blog is one of the best sources of information for what's happening in the Windows Live space for developers).

If you're inspired by Tafiti, and have interesting ideas for other specialized search experiences, be sure to listen to the part of the interview where Marc announces a contest (00:26:44). (Or just read the last paragraph of the video description on Channel9 :-)