Windows Live
Following the blogging of today's Microsoft announcement by Mike Arrington (with photos), Dave Winer, Dan Farber and Todd Bishop, the Windows Live home page is apparently live.com. Like Inform.com, I expect Windows Live will get criticism from the blogosphere for lack of Firefox support.
It looks suspiciously like a portal to me at first glance, but a bit of clicking makes it look more like an RSS aggregator. The RSS aggregator market is already over-saturated with competitors, Bill! Oh, and why call it Windows Live? It has nothing to do with Windows, nothing at all.
A quick View Source reveals a lot of Javascript, so it looks like it's AJAX all the way on this one, complete with "Loading" whenever you click on a link. I'd love to know how much .NET they actually have on the back end, if any.
The search function reveals a three-pronged attack of Web, News and Feed results, although you can only view them one at a time. Gabe from Memeorandum can sigh with relief at the lack of clustering, but Google News and Topix.net have a new competitor. Interesting to note that the site retains the blue/black/green paradigm, if a bit more washed out than the norm, but adds an orange Subscribe text link for feeds instead of the white-on-orange XML gif favoured by Dave Winer.
I tried doing a vanity search on Tinfinger, and got 944 results, which is a damn sight more than any other engine has returned. Maybe Google has a competitor after all. Whatever else it is, this announcement makes that Sun/Google hoo-hah look like chopped liver.
UPDATE: Bitingly accurate comment over at CrunchNotes:
It looks suspiciously like a portal to me at first glance, but a bit of clicking makes it look more like an RSS aggregator. The RSS aggregator market is already over-saturated with competitors, Bill! Oh, and why call it Windows Live? It has nothing to do with Windows, nothing at all.
A quick View Source reveals a lot of Javascript, so it looks like it's AJAX all the way on this one, complete with "Loading" whenever you click on a link. I'd love to know how much .NET they actually have on the back end, if any.
The search function reveals a three-pronged attack of Web, News and Feed results, although you can only view them one at a time. Gabe from Memeorandum can sigh with relief at the lack of clustering, but Google News and Topix.net have a new competitor. Interesting to note that the site retains the blue/black/green paradigm, if a bit more washed out than the norm, but adds an orange Subscribe text link for feeds instead of the white-on-orange XML gif favoured by Dave Winer.
I tried doing a vanity search on Tinfinger, and got 944 results, which is a damn sight more than any other engine has returned. Maybe Google has a competitor after all. Whatever else it is, this announcement makes that Sun/Google hoo-hah look like chopped liver.
UPDATE: Bitingly accurate comment over at CrunchNotes:
Why aren’t they using start.com? On the face of it both Live and Start look like they are seperated at birth…Paul Mooney links to Windows Live Ideas, which annoys me even further by branding everything as Windows Live this and that. Hey, we're back in 1989 with everything being WinAppName. Speaking of old school, a Jupiter analyst spooges over everything WinLive.
It's a nice collection of some old MSN stuff re-branded and some new offerings incorporating a lot of things users have been asking for and in some cases, have been getting from others.Talk about daming with faint praise! So it's bubble and squeak, a stew of leftovers reheated to lukewarm? Sign me up!
posted by Paul Montgomery | 6:13 am
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