Microsoft’s new start.com initiative

Jun 6, 2005 in General Discussions

Although its still in an incubation stage, Microsoft recently released part 3 of their start.com initiative. You can check out the latest incarnation here or here (if you want to skip the little puzzle).

Start.com is still in a preview phase but offers an interesting insight into what Microsoft might be planning for their next generation portal. Everyone in this game is trying to one up each other, I wouldn’t call Google the pioneer of AJAX but they definitely did bring it to the mainstream. With competition comes innovation so it’ll be interesting to see what Microsoft and Yahoo bring to the table. Anyone have a Yahoo 360 invite to send my way?

On the blogging front its nice to see the portal incorporating feeds and supporting opml. However I haven’t experiemented enough to see if it holds promise to replace my current web-based feed reader, bloglines. I’m a fairly demanding user in this respect and would rather use a multitude of tools to get the job done than one do-it-all cludgy tool. Once firefox support is rolled out (it is coming right?), I’ll play with it more.

The start.com UI is pleasant to look at and might prove usable once tuned for customer usage patterns. Will it replace Google News? I don’t think so, but it could offer competition when/if it goes live in some incarnation. My immediate suggestion beyond Firefox support, is the integration and sharing of different types of content… rss support is a good start though. For the record I stopped using Google News when they withdrew support for RSS feeds.

You have to remember that it’s all just an incubation project and might never see the light of day. That being said, I showed it to a couple people today who were impressed with the overall L&F aspects of the site.

The start.com program manager’s blog is available here.

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