Microsoft’s Start.com is a very pleasant departure – it has a very simple, clean design and, though still in beta, works well in Firefox (though not in Safari)! That in itself is unusual for a Microsoft application.
Start.com is an RSS aggregator (similar to Bloglines) with an AJAX interface so it is fast. Click on the Start link in the top left to see aggregator functionality – you can add feeds, browse the pre-included feeds or import your OPML file to quickly get all your own feeds in.
The site is extremely clean in Firefox on the Mac (see below) because a lot of the modules don’t display (!) but even so, it is just funky enough that I’ll be checking back from time to time to see how it is progressing (and to see if they have added Mac support!).
This is how the Start.com site looks in Firefox on the Mac:
Whereas this is how it looks in Firefox on the PC:
Hi Tom, that looks very similar to something Google put out a while ago – http://www.google.com/ig (although the start.com interface looks cleaner).
It does Michael,
but you have to hand it to Microsoft (painful though it may be!), the use of the AJAX interface makes Start.com a much nicer, cleaner, faster interface than the google/ig page.
Little touches like the Start dropdown menu, the ability to pin articles to the page and to move columns around the page, just ‘feel right’
Like I said in the post, if they get the Mac side of things right, I might check back there more often!
Hi Michael,
You’d be surprised, but this is an area where google is actually copying us. We started building the site last November and released it live on the web as http://start.com/1 in March. Google released their personalized ig page several weeks later (though it didn’t have RSS capabilities until recently), and we’ve been tracking them since. They’ve been copying most of our features within a month or so of when we release them. Just to set the record straight 🙂
Steve Rider
Oh that’s lovely Steve – you come to my site, leave a comment responding to another comment and fail completely to address the issues I raised in my post.
Go on ahead, ignore me,
See if I care,
*sniff*
*sniff*
*runs away crying*
start.com doesn’t work at all using firefox 1.0.6 on my machine (10.4.2)