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Saturday, January 10, 2004
MSN Makes Personalized Portals Interesting Again
As much as I have disparaged MSN as a viable portal in the past, I've got to hand it to Microsoft with their revamp this week of the MSN portal. Microsoft has completely re-architected MSN (on the .Net platform, it seems), and it takes full advantage of the more sophisticated tools available in 2004.
The MSN home page is impressive enough, with its elegant Flash billboard displaying stories of the day in vivid photography. But, where MSN really shines is the My MSN page, where user's can personalize their portal experience.
I'm not convinced that MSN has the same depth of content that My Yahoo boasts, but it certainly does make up for any content shortfall -- either real or perceived -- with a far superior presentation of content modules. You can even drag them around the page!
Another interesting development was the announcement also this week that eBay would join with MSN to bring My eBay inside a content module inside My MSN. That's right -- you'll be able to view and manage your bidding activities inside an integrated content module on another portal. I don't know exactly what kind of technology is behind this capability, but I'm guessing that it's another example of web services finally showing us what they can do.
All in all, I give Microsoft credit for taking portal technology to the next level. None of this would have been possible two years ago. Now, I'm hoping that Yahoo follows MSN's lead and renovates their outdated portal platform.
Posted by
Cory Kleinschmidt
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D'oh!
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