Windows Live has had another face lift. I was wondering when the Windows Live brand would start top get some traction, namely from a visuals perspective. Since I rebuilt my desktop PC (a teeny Shuttle PC that’s now about 3 years old) with Vista Beta 2 on it I’ve taken a minimalistic approach and installed Windows Live Mail Desktop and Live Messenger. By default they’ve got a dark blue style theme. This has now made it’s way onto the first page of Windows Live.
In traditional ‘you’re on a different page’ fashion the colour scheme is different on each page. It gives a instant visual recognition that you’re someplace else and on a different topic. Amazon, the BBC and other popular sites use this to great effect. Windows Live now has this for topics such as ‘Home’, ‘Sport’ and ‘News’.
One thing that the guys at Microsoft appear to have taken note of is the performance of Live. It has, frankly, been poor. Any RSS feeds I’d add myself took two or three times as long to load as the one’s provided by default. This is now better, but still is not fast enough. I’m still swaying in favour of Outlook 2007 being my preffered RSS reader in future.
The search has also had a bit of treatment and the ‘infinite’ scrollbar seems to work with a scrolly mouse now. I’m still a bit wary of the jumping scrollbar though when dragging through the list items.
So as Pageflakes, Netvibes and the other players in the RSS portal space fight it out for clicks Windows Live enters the fray again. Is is always going to be in perpetual Beta though? Start.com began many moons ago and has evolved very slowly over time. Then again it’s simply the way of ‘Web 2.0′ development these days.