Simply out of interest I installed the IE toolbar that the Windows Live service offers. My experience of it was, well, jaded to say the least.
When enterin a search term the live.com website opens in the main browser Window. Each gadget deligently loads (takes a few seconds on my page as I’ve got about four RSS readers, my Live Mail and the local weather) and then passes the query to the search. For a fraction of a second the search box opens (in all it’s Altas / Ajax glory) but then closes and the page starts to load the gadgets again. About a seond later the search box opens again and you get your search results.
Now I’m not sure if this is everyone’s experience. I haven’t installed the Live toolbar before because I’ve got IE7 at home and I’m only really interested in tabbed browsing in IE6 until I can get that everywhere. But this limited experience was poor. Needless to say the toolbar was uninstalled PDQ.
I’m not sure how long live.com will be my homepage of choice for. The gadgets take too long to load and sometimes don’t work at all. The whole Live experience seems too disjointed at the moment too. Expo sits alone from Mail. MS need to get some mashups of these apps sorted within their own space if they are to get the community to contribute to (or to even do it themselves). The early adopters want to hack. Why otherwise did Myspace.com get heckled at the Mix’06 event by someone shouting “open API’s”?