Profile - MSN Start.com
Michael Arrington
26 comments »
Company: What is it?
Start.com, an RSS aggregator and search service, is one of Microsoft’s “Sandbox” projects (Virtual Earth is another one). It is an AJAX application.
Start.com is comparable to Google’s IG or personalized home product. The primary features include a drag and drop interface, easy addition of RSS feeds (although auto-discovery doesn’t seem to work very well, it hung multiple times on me), and integration with MSN Search. Feeds and other content are listed in a drop down menu on the left, and content can be “pinned” anywhere on the page. The Start.com blog is here.
Key Features:
- “pin” content (feeds or search results) anywhere on the page
- drag pinned content anywhere on the page
- remove any content
- increase or decrease the number of columns
- change the basic look of the page (”granite”, “ice”, etc.)
The only thing I can’t figure out how to do is delete the “popular” feeds that are pre-populated from the drop down menu.
Like Google’s RSS aggregator, this is a great service for RSS newbies or people who only read a limited number of feeds.
Team:
Scott Isaacs, the architect for start’s framework
Steve Rider, lead developer
Jose Saura, lead developer
Sanaz Shari, program manager
Additional Links: Tom’s Hardware Guide, Jason Calcanis, Jake Jarvis, Terminally Incoherent, Jason Preston, Ipswitch Blog, Subzero Blue, ZeroSpace, MusingsoftheCookieDomain, WhoisJoe, PirateKing, Intersplice,
Intrepidity, Blogmanic, jb’sblog, Glaysher, Phil Bradley, TorresTalking, Jerome Laban, Eric Hammersley
August 29th, 2005 at 11:53 am
November 1st, 2005 at 6:45 pm
December 27th, 2005 at 5:02 am
January 15th, 2006 at 5:32 am
January 21st, 2006 at 9:41 pm
January 21st, 2006 at 10:11 pm
August 14th, 2007 at 5:20 am