Some pretty cool Microsoft Silverlight uses emerged this week. The CMA came with a game called “Be This Close” and Photobucket released a Visual Search Tool that makes use of Silverlight and the Messenger Web Bar.

CMA, Be This Close Scavenger Hunt

The Country Music Association (CMA) and Microsoft teamed up at the CMA Music Festival in Nashville. Using Silverlight Deep Zoom, Microsoft and partner Firefly Logic built a rich and compelling user experience for CMA showcasing 850+ images of country music artists, highlighting past festivals, fan experiences and country music performances in a fun, game-oriented format called “Be This Close.” 

You can check it out yourself at http://www.cmafest.com/bethisclose. The CMA will be promoting the Be This Close experience to radio stations around the country starting this week.

Photobucket Visual Search

Sarah reported that Photobucket, one of the world’s most popular photo-sharing websites, was preparing to release a new tool for finding photos on the site: a visual search engine. We can tell you now this tool has been released. Once you’ve done a search on the site you will see a link to visual search at the bottom right:
 
Once you click it, the Silverlight powered page with your search results will start to load.

 
If you place your cursor over a picture in the search results you can see that you can easily Search more like this or go to the authors library. Even more interesting is Enlarge & Share:
 
Not only can you browse through all the search results (by clicking arrows) but you can get everything you need to share it there too.

Whether you want to link people, embed it on your site, download the picture or….hey wait a minute, Share with Live? What does that do? Well, you might have noticed the Windows Live Messenger Web Bar at the bottom left. If you click Share with Live it will ask you to log in there. After you’ve logged in clicking Share with Live will result in your contact list popping up. Just choose the contact you wish to share this photo with and a link will be sent.
 
A link yes, it looks a lot like one of those SPIM messages you get, so make sure your contact knows it’s not (esp. if it’s the first message you send). Maybe in future this can be replaced by showing the picture in Messenger directly….