Yesterday Microsoft made it public that they are working on an web-based RSS Aggregator and also an online bookmark service . It is more like a simple start page idea as one can say from the http://start.com/1 url as well. I thought I could do a screencast of the new aggregator. It didn’t turn out as good as I would like it to be, but unfortunately I do not have too much time in my hands to perfect it. I decided to post it anyways because I wanted to get it out of the door before I notice anyone else does a screencast.
You can check out the screencast here. It is in flash movie format. I have to apologize for the sound. You will hear my laptop’s hard drive screaming at the beginning. I wish I had a better sound setup at the time but I hope everyone can live with that.
As a review, I can say that it looks pretty cool. The interface and the page looks very unlike Microsoft and very Google like. Simple and fast. However, it lacks a lot of crucial features for an aggregator at this point. I am sure those features will be added very soon. But, in my opinion, being that late in the game, Microsoft should be able to introduce some extra stuff to prevent being Bloglines or MyYahoo clone. As a final note, I have to say, I am impressed how fast they introduced the Firefox support. Now, the other start page should provide Firefox support. I think the support will be there soon.
UPDATE: You may also want to check out the story at Inside Microsoft, and SiliconBeat
UPDATE 2: Steve Rider of Microsoft left a comment and said that he pointed Mike Torres of MSN to the screencast and there is now a link to it at Mike Torres’ blog. This is too cool for me. Thanks Steve and Mike.
Hi Turker, I’m one of the folks behind start.com and I wanted to say that I *love* the screencast you put up. Very cool stuff! It was neat to see this released so soon after we were discovered too. I also wanted to let you know that the problems you encountered while filming should now be fixed (the disappearing popular feeds list and the autodiscovery mechanism not working). Again, great job! I told a buddy of mine who works in MSN Spaces and he linked to your screencast from his blog at http://spaces.msn.com/members/mike/.
Steve
Hi Steve, thank you very much for your comment and kind words. It means a lot that you loved the screencast. I am glad that the problems that I encountered were fixed. I guess it was a live demonstration of a bug:) Also, thanks for pointing Mike to the screencast. It is priceless to have a link from his blog to here.
with Bloglines and Spurl.net until they add some more to their offering. Turker has a cool screencast of the aggregator online. Thi [...]