MSN.com, Microsoft's search, news and services portal page, hasn't weathered the years well. Tweaking the same basic design for a decade left it far behind the times in terms of design and usability. With today's clean, whitespace-friendly, reimagining of MSN.com, Microsoft ditches the spectre of MSN search and delivers a site that's a little more worthy of showcasing the company's new search hotness, Bing.

A prettier, less cluttered layout and a prominent Bing search bar aren't the only upgrades to the homepage. In a touch that says Microsoft actually knows what year it is after all, you can add your Facebook newsfeed and your Twitter stream to an area on the right side of the page. The news is still there, but it's more customizable, and the layout presents fewer stories at a time than the cluttered old MSN.com did. There's also a local focus, with local weather and a Bing-powered local news widget at the bottom left.

I have to say that, compared to the MSN of old, this new design looks attractive and functional. Speaking of comparisons, though, have a look at our gallery of MSN.com designs since 2001. Looking at how slowly the site changed over the years only underlines how much it just changed overnight.

With all of the redesigning to focus Facebook on your News Feed, one classic Facebook feature got lost in the shuffle. What happened to Groups? Facebook must have noticed that Groups had become virtually useless, because they've just taken some steps to upgrade the feature back to first-class citizen status. Groups now have walls, just like Profiles and Pages, and group activity now has a place in the News Feed.

Although Groups now look extremely to Pages, they still serve two distinct purposes. Pages are for broadcasting information one-way to fans, and Groups are for interaction amongst members. The new discussions tab on each group's page emphasizes the collaborative aspect of Groups. It's nice to see a great feature back from the dead, and doing a lot more than cluttering up your profile.

[via AppScout]

In our reader poll, most of you thought Facebook should pay attention to the user backlash against its new design. Well, it turns out that they've done just that, with an in-depth blog post that acknowledges some of the main concerns people have expressed, and announces several new features due to roll out soon. One thing that's happening right away is an update to the new "highlights" sidebar that should make it more like the old Live Feed that people seem to be missing.

The upcoming features are centered around giving you more control over what you see in your activity stream. For example, autoupdating is coming back (as an optional feature) and the ability to filter out noisy apps is being introduced. Facebook is also considering decreasing the amount of one-to-one messages -- like people's wall posts to one another -- that show up in your stream, in favor of things that are more generally relevant. My personal favorite feature on Facebook's to-do list is adding tagged photos of your friends to the stream.

Since we got so much great feedback last time, let's open this up to the readers. Take this poll and let us know which of Facebook's announced improvements is your favorite, or whether they're all just hopeless.

There's a buzz going around about a poll on Facebook, where 94% of the almost 800,000 respondents gave the site's new redesign a thumbs-down. That's a pretty big sample size, so it seems clear enough that at least a portion of Facebook's base isn't happy with the changes they've made. The important question might not be "do people like the new redesign?" though. It might be, "Does it matter whether people like it?"

I'm with Eric Eldon at VentureBeat on this one: users don't always know what they want, and a lot of people have negative attitudes toward having to relearn a site they were already very familiar with. When the dust clears a little bit, and folks have had a chance to test-drive the site a bit, then Facebook might have to start listening to constructive criticism. For right now, they should -- and will, more than likely -- work out any kinks in the new design, but give it some time to win people over.

Download Squad readers, what do you think? Do initial user reactions to the new design matter? Should Facebook scrap it, or give it a chance, and why? Vote in our poll, or leave a comment if you have more to say.

Download Squad isn't alone when it comes to awesome redesigns -- today, Weblogs Inc.'s parent company, AOL, launched a totally redesigned AOL.com. It looks pretty great, especially when you compare it to the other portal offerings from Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. The biggest change comes in the form of allowing direct access to outside content -- including e-mail providers like Yahoo and Gmail, social networks like Facebook and MySpace and links to non AOL sites via a new RSS reader built into the site.

I had the opportunity to talk to James Clark, the VP of the AOL.com portal, about the redesign process, both from a business and web development level, as well as ways AOL is hoping to use the newly designed page to help transform the AOL brand.

Redesigning a site of any scale can be a challenge, but redesigning a site that receives over a billion PVs a month opens up an entirely new set of both business and user challenges. Starting in 2007, the AOL team started doing research on how its competitors display the web and more importantly, how end users (not necessarily AOL users, just Internet users) use the Internet. James told me that what they found was that the "one size fits all portal was outdated and outmoded." In this day and age, even traditional AOL users get content from multiple services and expect a level of control that traditional portals just don't give them.

Last month, AOL addressed those needs by implementing the ability to check and view e-mail from other providers -- like Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail -- directly from the AOL.com page, the same way AOL users can access AOL mail. Today's redesign continues with that trend, offering access to MySpace, Facebook, and AIM (Twitter and Bebo support will be complete very soon) all from AOL.com. You can even update all profiles simultaneously directly from the toolbar.

Additionally, users can add their own links to pages right at the top of the screen (and you don't even have to register or login to access any of this stuff -- not even Google will let you customize stuff without logging in with a Google account). Probably the coolest feature is at the bottom of the home page. AOL has integrated an RSS reader into the page. It comes preloaded with categories and websites, but you can add your own categories and your own sites. Even more interesting, the sites aren't just AOL properties. In the Tech section, for instance, CNET, TechCrunch, Slashdot and Wired are all listed -- and none of those sites are affiliated with AOL.

As Steve Jobs would say, "boom." Download Squad readers with keen eyes have taken notice; we've gotten our first full redesign in our history.

It's green, it's hot and we luvs it. You can quickly jump to points of interest from the top of the page, we got rid of some nagging limitations of our original design and, just for kicks, we threw the extra $10 for the new logo. Maybe AOL read Adam's "So you wanna be a web developer?" post, ya think?

In all seriousness, big thanks to Erik and Victor who managed to make this all happen. We really hope you love our new design just as much as we do, so tell us what you think!

At some point you've probably used evite, either by receiving or sending an invitation. In the past the online application was great for sending invitations but it was a one shot deal - create and send an evite and when the event is over, the evite is dead.

Last year evite went mobile in an effort to keep up with all of us and on Friday, evite went 2.0. Users can now integrate photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube and playlists from Imeem. The changes should make it easier to integrate content you already have on the web into your evite options instead of requiring separate uploads of information.

The redesign also attempts to make evite easier to navigate, introducing more tabs for organizing different sections of the site. Developers have also added some custom options for the way hosts and attendees can interact with each other.

[via Mashable, CNET]

MySpace has rolled out its anticipated site-wide redesign today. There's a shiny new search engine which displays results from your friends first and lets you sort your results by movies, music, the web, or all of MySpace. And site navigation has been improved so that it takes less clicks to get from one part of the site to another.

There's also a new video player which supports higher quality videos playing at 480p resolution. That makes the MySpace video player a lot nicer than YouTube's current offering. But if you're a MySpace traditionalist, don't worry, the site still has its obnoxious side. For example, when you visit the main page you'll be greeted by a huge advertisement which pushes the content about halfway down the window. Classy, right?

And of course, if you're worried that you won't recognize MySpace with its new look and all, you can always install a Firefox plugin that will alert you any time you accidentally find yourself on the social networking site.

[via TechCrunch]

There has always been one major problem with the internet: it's run by humans instead of LOLcats. Sadly, the government isn't into LOLcats, so we'll never see the dream realized. There is, however, a simulation effort. I'd like to introduce the LOLinator.

The LOLinator is a website designed by an underground effort of LOLcats to show the world what an LOLcat internet would look like. It takes any website and sends it back to the LOLcat home base, where LOLcats work quickly and efficiently to create a simulation of an LOLcat version. A couple websites we recommend running through the system are Apple.com, Apple.com/store, and Microsoft.com.

The image above shows what an LOLcat run Download Squad would look like. Personally, we think it's an improvement, but the discrimination against cats in the workplace would never land us any cat employees. What a sad world we live in. Oh yeah, if you have any suggestions for sites to run through the LOLinator, please leave them in the comments.

Microsoft is headed towards the rollout of a new Live.com search today, including a brand spankin' new interface.

There will be a gathering in Mountain View at the Microsoft campus for industry insiders to get a glimpse at Microsoft's latest search interface and redesign today. The new redesign will see a refreshing look for the search interface taking cues from both Ask and Google Universal Search. MSN Shopping will also get tied into the search results for consumer product results, making for an all around better user experience.

Akram Hussein, a Windows Live Platform Program Manager caught a glimpse of the new look while on his home PC, and managed to snap a few shots of the cleaned up design. He has since pulled down the post with images from his website but we did manage to get copies and have compared them with the current Live.com search results. We will have to wait and see what else is truly unveiled as all information from the meeting will be under an embargo for later this evening.

In more MSN news, there is also talk of MSN Video adding instant start and less intrusive ads in video content.

UPDATE: Microsoft's press release on the new updated Live Search Engine.



[via marketingpilgrim]

There's still no images section, but Digg has launched a new front page design that includes both videos and text articles.

Up until now, the videos were hidden off in their own section, so you'd only find funny/weird/interesting movies if you went looking for them. And really, where's the fun in that?

Now videos have a chance of showing up on the front page just like every other article submitted to Digg. Last time we checked, there was only one video on the front page, although there were plenty of other videos with a higher number of diggs. So it's not clear how it's determined whether a video will make the front page.

If you'd rather not see videos, you can click on the "News" tab. To switch back to the combined views, just click "All."

There are a few other subtle tweaks including a one-click "bury" command that makes it easier to vote against a story. Given that Reddit, StumbleUpon, and other services have a simple thumbs up or down system, it was getting a bit silly that it took two clicks to bury a Digg story.

Yesterday afternoon, popular social event website and Yahoo! property Upcoming.org surprised users by redesigning and requiring the merging of existing accounts with Yahoo! accounts. The changes came without warning, possibly in an attempt to avoid a user backlash similar to that which erupted after big brother Flickra few months ago. announced the merging of accounts As way of making it up to their users, Upcoming is giving away a bunch of special Upcoming.org t-shirts to 'old skool' users who've been using the site for a while.

On the redesign side of the news, the new look is cleaner, faster to load, and introduces a whole new way of browsing events which centers around more specific metro's and integrated maps. The new interface is overall more media driven, and resembles in a way the recent Facebook redesign.

In addition to the most obvious changes mentioned above, Upcoming.org is no longer actually upcoming.org, but upcoming.yahoo.com.

Update: Apparently the updates were not unannounced; they were posted on the official blog multiple times. They did not, however, send an email notice to users in the same way Flickr did.

Host to many, many a website, DreamHost decided it was time to bring some new hotness to their web admin control panel. Gone are the dark blue roll-out headers in favor of a much lighter AJAX + full CSS design, with subtle gradients and even a pseudo-tag area under the Home > Overview section (we only rank it as 'pseudo' due to its tag-like appearance, but rightful lack of actual tagging features). Some may question why such a robust new system is necessary for a bunch of web admin nerds, but we say bring on the well-designed, über-functional CP any day.

A post at the DreamHost blog explains all that is new about the redesigned CP, and hints that some truly new features are still to come.

Userscripts.org is a useful repository of scripts for Greasemonkey, the killer Firefox add-on that allows you to augment the way some sites look or function. I've used the site for some time now, but was always a little irked at its not-so-intuitive design. As you can see, the new design offers a breath of fresh air, with a much cleaner and more streamlined experience, though it isn't quite a major feature update just yet. This post in their forums announces the new site and their intentions, while the roadmap at the bottom of their wiki reveals a bit more about what's to come.


Individual script pages look good in this new format, with a clear description column and a sidebar containing all the pertinent metadata and tags. A big black "Install this script" button replaces the old, hard-to-find HTML link of the previous design, and I particularly like the link at the bottom of the content column to contributors who helped out with the script.

All things considered, I think this is a successful redesign that should bring the site more credibility and attention from both Greasemonkey script writers and users. I'll be interested to see how those new features roll into the site in the coming weeks and months.

Hot on the heels of a major overhaul of Google Reader, Google has announced a brand new beta version of Google Groups. The new Google Groups, which is currently living at groups-beta.google.com, is slicker in every way, and also "fits in" a little better with the growing family of Google web apps. In fact, some parts of the interface look a whole lot like Gmail, with rounded borders around each message and a Compose form that's very familiar. On top of the interface changes, however, there are some serious new features. Members of groups can now collaboratively create web pages a la Google Page Creator, group administrators can now customize their group's color scheme and graphics, and now groups have a Files section where users can upload files to share with other group members. For the first time, Google Groups is starting to feel to me like an actual contender to Yahoo! Groups' long-held crown.