The RSS Blog

Microsoft has announced a new Web 2.0 initiative called Live.com. And of course, the blogosphere is littered with commentary on how this will or will not change the world. Personally, I find this to be a complete non-announcement. When your press release includes statements like "powered by cutting-edge technologies such as RSS and Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX)", then I tend to yawn. An end user really shouldn't care what technology is under the hood. I mean, did you really think Microsoft was gonna ignore Gmail and not come out with their own AJAX powered Web mail (AJAX mail). Anyhow, here's a short run-down of what's new in Live.boring!

• Live.com beta is an AJAX powered Web aggregator.
• Live Mail beta is an AJAX powered Web mail.
• Live Safety Center beta is a Web-based malware self-help thingy.
• Live Favorites beta syncs your IE favorites between your computers.
• They also have a Windows Live Messenger around the corner.

Can you say branding exercise? Anyhow, lots to check out.

• Live.com review - This doesn't seem to work. I click "Add Content", then I type "The RSS Blog" and I don't get "The RSS Blog", but I do get a lot of crap. The problem is that it's collapsing all the of feeds at FeedBurner and the search by domain doesn't work, so you'll never find my blog there. Next!
• Live Favorites - This seems like a social bookmarking thing. I was hoping it was gonna sync my IE favorites. I guess I was wrong. I couldn't figure it out.

Oops! I give up. Microsoft now insists that I'm French (ok, maybe I am) and isn't giving me an option to switch back to English. Goodbye! BTW, they offer a smaller subset of the features to lang="fr" people. Maybe Microsoft should rename this buggy.com. I'm kinda getting tired of this whole beta thing.

Update: I checked out Live Safety Center. That was actually pretty good and could be very useful to the mundane user who doesn't already have Virus protection. In fact, I'm using AVG which is malware that scans for malware. Live Safety Center means I can uninstalled AVG tonight. Now, I don't have to worry about AVG thrashing my harddrive every morning.