So I’m certainly not the world’s biggest Microsoft fan. Lots of their software is bloated and dumb (see FrontPage and Project). But let’s admit it– they sell software that (nearly) anyone who has a computer on their desk at work uses every day to pretty good effect (see Word and Outlook).
They’ve lately been put to
shame
when it comes to innovation on the internet, as the weblog explosion and maps/ music/ mashups world has nothing to do with them at all.
So when I heard about their RSS aggregator/ gadget holder/ ajax-y portal thingy at Live.com I was skeptical. But I like it.
- I like their defaults. I’m all for configuring the best experience of software, but I value the simplicity of dafults. As opposed to Rojo, which flooded me with an insane amount of posts, Windows Live delivers a nice box-set of the five most recent posts of any of the blogs or news feeds I’m interested in. When you click one of them, the system delivers the fully expanded post that you clicked on as well as the headlines for the ones above and below it, with up to 10 delivered on the page
- The import of 109 feeds from my Bloglines account was crazy simple. Google Reader choked hard on the import when I tried it there.
- Very simple design that has just a few options (color, number of columns, arrangement of feeds) and not an overwhelming number of ways to configure
- Their gadgets are not as cool or as deep as Konfabulator but I appreciate the effort.
Bottom line:
I still stick with Bloglines for my serious
consumption
of all blog/ news posts that have been published since I last checked. But if I have to be on IE on a PC for some reason, or if I just want to get a dashboard pulse of what’s being published right now, Live.com is a great