Start.com: Ajaxian Portal

<>p>People were excited to see what Google would come up with, when they showed their personalized search page.

Microsoft has a sidekick project: Start.com, which looks similar to the Google portal.

There is a lot of Ajax going on there, from having portlet which have their own little lifecycle, dynamically being able to change the layout, and more.

A few quirks are around too, such as right-clicking in areas, and it looks like you can drag and drop in places that you can’t…. and it takes you a bit to grok their usability… but hey this is beta!

Click on the left top logo and poke around.

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Compared to MyGoogle start.com is very, very slow..

Comment by Tinus — July 29, 2005

“and it takes you a bit to grok their usability…”

Minor quibble: by that sentence I think you mean “it takes some time to learn how Start’s features work.” Users don’t grok a product’s usability, and products don’t “have some usability.” If Start is hard to understand and use, just say so. It’s not *your* fault that it doesn’t make immediate sense, after all. It’s *their* damn fault.

Think of usability like the volume of a sound, something a listener perceives: “wow that motorcycle is really loud” is analagous to “wow that site sure is unusable.”

Comment by a — July 29, 2005

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