Sanaz Ahari and Steve Rider - Start.com

The Discussion

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  bright and early Intresting stuff
  

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  Sorry, I wasn't expecting to use the stuff I shot on the way to the office so I was saving the "who, what, where, when, why questions" for then.

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  Is this the place?
  
  beautiful - these videos are driving me nuts because they make me realize how much I hate my job and minnesota If 2 people can ship something as awesome as that maybe there's hope MSN Search will let me build my Google Mini killer - give me 2 people, 2 months

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  Cool stuff! It will be great to have a hotmail module on start.com/myw3b and international weather support too.

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  great stuff...
  
  they are like research inside the core of campus - funny think indeed ...
  

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  MS should free up just 10% of your Longhorn team & break them up into 4 people teams and have them go at independent projects. Seems like everything is tied up into Longhorn these days.
  

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  Great stuff... I like start.com because of its simplistic design and compatibility with Firefox. I'd love to see more MSN sites done in a similar fashion as well as better integration among all these great new MSN services.

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  ha, i was driving on 148th today, went right by redwest.
  redwest is nice.
  

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  I like the innovation there. It's a shame MS don't market the site a bit more.
  

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  anyone got invited to msn messenger beta as well as Mail
  

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  Wow, that works really well, that will definately be my start page from now on! I like the clean look and Steve and Sanaz have some great AJAX skills .
  
  So keep up the good work!
  (Btw a "reset" button would come in handy especialy after some experimenting, it's hard to get it all right again , in firefox I couldn't set the number of colums anymore after a while.)
  

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  Ahh Redwest - that's the name of the campus
  
  http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/archive/2005/07/12/438157.aspx
  
  this has to be the most beautiful place on earth
  
  http://www.frostnet.net/chris/photos/summer_2003/microsoft/red_west/
  
  I used to think that my office was the most beautiful place on earth (its pretty ornate), but this is unreal - check out those photo graphs.
  
  I made a little compilation of interesting things around redwest like apartments, the bike shop, etc. but I have a fealing this list is going to become huge real fast http://www.Nata1.com/GoogleEarth.xml  

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  intl support is coming very soon... we're working on hotmail too.
  
  you can actually see those plans on the whiteboard during the interview
  
  sanaz.

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  I've been playing with start.com since /1 didn't know about this new one.  Saw the demo and was like WOW, they've improved that the new look is way better then the last one.  Serve me right for using old bookmarks.
  
  Really cool stuff.  So cool I'm tempted to turn on active desktop and have it there permanently.

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  I don't get it. I can add rss feeds, but I can't tell if my feeds have new items? I have to visit each feed? Am I missing something?
  

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  Minh - we don't have feed read/unread support yet. 
  
  also, it's a bit misleading to refer to start as an rss aggregator, which presets some expectations such as the aforementioned.
  
  we alluded to this in the interview, by describing start as:
  bloglines meet my yahoo meet konfabulator - we don't want be just an entry point or a feed manager we'd like to be your personalized one-stop shop for the web.
   
  thanks, sanaz.

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  For most users the issue is not if start.com will be beautiful or useful or easy to use or something so new, but the issue is if MSN will provide a single, consistent and simple interface accross all its site and do that now and not after all its compeeditors have done. MSN is slow in moving. MSN reminds me of a site built by more than one company. MSN does not strive for simplicity (looked at the new Shopping site?) but instead thinks more componentization (Passport is not on the same page but on a separate domain) and of features, as well as advertising. Many features confuse users. The web is not for overloaded pages. The web is for simple and nice looking services (Google maps?). The web is a fast market and MSN takes too longto think the details but forgets that what matters is the look, the simple urls (not spaces.msn.com/members/mylongname) and consistency.

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  Please hire me ... I want to work on something coooool
  
  Actually, start.com looks ans works great. Like you, I am a massive Google fan, and have come to dislike MS websites in the past, specially Hotmail. But this is something completely different. User friendly, alternative to IE friendly (which is a big step).
  
  Like it, like it, like it.
  
  My website (although not a 100% done yet) is 100% AJAX. Only one page load, and then the content is fetched by Ajax components. Very, very cool stuff, although I say so myself :o
  
  Again ... please hire me
  

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  Hey hey! Start.com works in Firefox too. Neat.
  

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  Hi ,
    
       The idea is great. MSN have to think about such
  
  things in nearing future. Simple and neat.
  
  When 2 people can do so much then MSN is 
  
  missing something.
  
  All the Best to Sanaz and Steve.
  
  Thanks
  
  Arun.
  
     
    

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  sanaz ahari wrote:

  bloglines meet my yahoo meet konfabulator - we don't want be just an entry point or a feed manager we'd like to be your personalized one-stop shop for the web.
   
  thanks, sanaz.

  I would so pay real money for an AJAX RSS aggregator. Blogline UI bugs the heck out of me.
  
  Edit: I guess that would require some server-side storage.
  

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  Start.com is truely a wondeful website. I love it!
  

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  You know I tried that site and actually understood its potential. I think its a great evolution from what most front pages are about, well done and get it on MSN now.
  
  Samuel, UK
  

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  What does "<3" mean?
  
  and why do you come here when you like Linux Rules Linux so much?
  

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  moofish wrote:

  <3

  
  
  Hmmm... a heart?
  

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  It does look like a heart sorta. I do wonder why he comes here and talks about linux all the time though.
  

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  It just dawned on me how super cool this is - I hope I can do that on MSN sometime soon, because I would actually use it for my homepage.
  
  Holy cow would that be cool or what....
  
  The dude who thought this up, your a genius
  
  MSN Rocks! Holy cow have I been impressed lately, they're doing all sorts of innovated stuff, and they're only getting started.

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  Any chance I could get Steve Rider to look at the following blog post?
  
  http://www.joshuahayworth.com/just_trying_to_figure_out/2005/07/startcoms_aggre.html
  
  There seems to be a bug in their RSS Feed reader.  It doesn't parse Dave Winer's titles correctly.
  
  Just a thought.
  
  Joshua
  
  p.s. Hey Scoble?  Any idea why you didn't pick up this post in your any of your egoFeeds?  Pubsub or Technorati?  I was sure I submitted my site to each of those services to be spidered.
  
  <shrug>
  
  Oh well.
  

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  Hi, Version 1 had a link so once I had set up my feeds I could use this link to access the same feeds on another PC without setting up again.
  
  I love v3 but where is the link that allows my feed to be seen on my other computers
  
  Erwlas
  
  (Not a dev....just a very interested user)

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  Lol, The puzzle is easy if you look inside Puzzle.js
  
  Did Microsoft buy the start.com domain name or did they own it from day one?
  
  It's a nice project, but I don't see it's future if it stays something like this. There is stuff like this around, friends of mine use it local on there pc. Sure it is nice to bring this to a larger public, so my mom/dad can use it, but will they stay using it?
  
  The 'WOW AMAZING' factor is missing, there is nothing inside me that tells me I need to replace google.com for the start.com homepage.
  
  Anyway keep the good work up!
  
  Edit oops: I just noticed the START preview image is a button =) This is better I can add my own feeds.

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  Cool enough, the idea is very nice.
  
  And Scoble, please do more exercises for your audiences. I can hear your breathy voice clearly from the video when you go up the stairs.

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  Well this site made IE crash on first vist. lol

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  Just saw it posted on Slashdot like it was the newest thing since sliced bread.  Looks like it got slashdoted as well.
  
  I was reading some of the comments and boy does it get ripped to shreds by the anti-MS zealots.  It just gets shredded because of who owns the site   

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  Joshua: I'll foward that to the Start.com team.