Live.com reaction
Okay, I gotta give my knee-jerk reaction to www.live.com. There
doesn’t appear to be anything new about this site, except that it seems
that Microsoft is starting to discover web applications and thats its
hip to label all of your services “beta” a la Google (thats actually
more a criticism of Google than MS because live.com certainly is in
beta form). I mean come on, Google launched their home
page/portal with little widgets and rss/atom/blogs/news feeds built in
months ago. Google’s site also has GMail integration, just like
live.com has hotmail integration. Nothing new here, except they
haven’t quite got the firefox implementation down just yet, I mean
countless other sites have, but you know that Microsoft is a little
resource strapped, so they certainly don’t have the manpower to
investigate the nuances of the firefox dhtml/ajax model.
Scoble says something like “its an advertising platform”,
which is bullshit, at least for now, he hints at some subdomains
popping up, so we’ll see what that brings, but right now live.com is an
IE only implementation of Google’s personalized home page.
Dennis van der Stelt said,
Wrote on November 2, 2005 @ 3:54 am
What’s the difference between live.com and start.com ???
Anonymous said,
Wrote on November 2, 2005 @ 8:56 am
“What’s the difference between live.com and start.com ???”
The start.com folks say it’s the same thing on their blog
http://spaces.msn.com/members/startcom/Blog/cns!1pTNqgeSRxwfEFK-lp62aiFQ!480.entry
So Ben, the whole notion that this is a copy of google’s home page is a little off since start has been around for a while. Although Google made theirs more public over the last few months. I’ve always thought that start.com looked better than google’s personalized home page. Probably a personal preference because the functionality is basically the same.
As for the firefox deal, start.com supports firefox. Crazy. Not sure what they did to mess that up when moving to live.com.
breichelt said,
Wrote on November 2, 2005 @ 9:13 am
Yes, you can definitely see where they put to use the start.com work, but you’re right Dan, start.com has worked in firefox for awhile, so its weird why live.com wouldn’t. And, while start.com has been around for awhile, I still dont see why theres all this fanfare around live.com? When google published their personalized home page, there was little buzz, except for on some blogs, and nobody was saying that it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
And I agree that the preference between start.com or google is just a preference, at this point you get the same thing regardless of which one you use, I’m a google man, personally
Anonymous said,
Wrote on November 3, 2005 @ 8:33 pm
Why does Google get credit for the personalized portal? I’ve been using my Yahoo for years (with Yahoo! Mail integration).
Google copies just like everyone else. Google created anything new, they’ve just improved on other people’s stuff. And that isn’t a criticism, its what software developers do. Somehow, people view it as a negative thing when Microsoft does the same.
breichelt said,
Wrote on November 3, 2005 @ 8:44 pm
Joshua, portals existed before Googles personalized portal, but nobody used dhtml as well as they have. the page also loads quickly and is very clean and simple to use. When google does stuff like this its never a big media hoopla on their part, they just kind of release it and say “here it is, do what you will.” Whereas with Microsoft, they have a whole launch event and formal press and things like that, basically clamoring for attention, it takes the luster off of something if people have to ask for attention, rather than people just discovering it.