Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Web services, Microsoft
Start is Microsoft's version of Google Homepage
by Victor Agreda, Jr. Jul 27th 2005 at 2:08AM
If you haven't tried Google's personalized homepage (similar to MyYahoo), give it a peek after getting your Gmail account. Next, you'll want to try the Next Great Copy from Microsoft: Start. It's just like Google's, but of course uses MSN for search and isn't Safari compatible. It does, however, use Ajax, and looks pretty swanky.Hot on the heels of aping offerings like Google Earth, MS seems pretty intent on matching the moves of their "do no evil" web-based competitors from sunny Mountain View. When I opened up the page it magically new I like BBC News, Engadget, and BoingBoing. Oh wait, there's the weather for Redmond. Looks like they just know what geeks like me want on their pages... What, no Slashdot? Start is working on Firefox on my Mac, and no doubt will work just fine in IE... Now I wonder what it holds for the future of IE7, and LongVista?
I don't know if this is a labor of love or merely the brainchild of four very gifted games designers, but Level Up is a really weird mash-up of gaming elements that you have probably never seen in a Flash game before.
Let's start with the premise itself: Groundhog Day meets Memento. The game experience revolves around 'days': you explore the world and the clock slowly ticks towards the evening. You bounce around picking up gems and talking to the denizens of 'Level Upland'. Eventually you feel tired and head back to ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
~J~ said 7:37AM on 7-27-2005
Just had a play with this. VERY nice, quite friendly and simple to use.
Seems to have a bit more 'ease-of-use' than the other attempts.
The feeds is VERY well done.
Reply
asquared said 8:02AM on 7-27-2005
just to let you know this has been around for quite a while. additionally wouldn't my msn be a closer competitor to the new google homepage or does that not fit into the slant of the story?
Reply
Vasanth said 12:10PM on 7-27-2005
Microsoft's Start has been around longer than Google's personalized homepage.
Reply
Brian Pipa said 8:38AM on 7-27-2005
You can actually add any feed you want to it. It even lets you import an OPML file into it to get a bunch of feeds into it quickly and easily. Pretty cool. Just click on the upper right "Start preview" image.
brian
http://myvogonpoetry.com
Reply
Scott Hughes said 4:54PM on 7-28-2005
start.com is more of a testing ground for new MSN technologies. It pre-dates the personalized Google home page by several months that I know of...
Reply
Victor Agreda, Jr. said 10:51AM on 7-27-2005
As the Gene Wilder edition of Willy Wonka would say, "scratch that, reverse it."
Of course, Start is actually on it's third iteration now. It has always had support for adding your own RSS feeds. It keeps getting better from what I can see. Google is actually playing catch-up in this case...
Reply
saycheese said 4:31PM on 8-02-2005
Victor, not to be a smart ass, but you might need to proof read the articles better.. there are typos and grammatical errors in the post. A little more care is warranted.
Reply