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Start.

Forcing? What if we just prefer to use other sites? Look, Safari (for example) has trouble rendering some sites. But these tend to be sites no self-respecting Mac user would ever care to visit. Sites like www.start.com, a Microsoft property rotten with the trademark Microsoft aesthetic. Or spreadsheets.google.com—how many real Mac users would rather use a spreadsheet than a purpose-built Cocoa app? And as for www.bananarepublic.com, give me a break. We're so over beige.

My point, seriously, if I even have one, is this: I've never even seen a site Safari won't render, or at least not a site I'd bother opening Firefox or Camino to visit. The sites I care about most tend to be run by people with Mac-compatible tastes. You won't find me visiting windowsupdate.com.

because start.com, the beta version of live.com, predates google.com/ig. You can read the post here Google copied Microsoft. Check and mate.

AV-ClamWin, Watchdog (works in conjunctions w/ ClamWin, Foxit PDFreader. But in the scheme of things this is really just a reaction to Microsoft's http://ideas.live.com/ Take a look. The OneCare app is an inbound/outbound firewall to replace the built in xp inbound firewall/virus scanner, etc. The http://start.com/ - the testing site and http://live.com/ - their production site even started using Gadgets http://microsoftgadgets.com/, just as Yahoo bought Konfabulator http://widgets.yahoo.com/ & has widgets now. Google just made some more API's available and brought out Google modules http://www.google.com/ig/directory Microsoft is working on a new messenger program, a primitive mapping program (that they've had for a long time), the whole live site is basic white even. Every one is getting the minimalist sites and all-in-one package deals. If you check the big browsers they are all competing for a desktop/browser setup. Personnally, I don't like when my browsers take their crap onto my desktop and make apps out of them. Anything that indexes my desktop seems like a security risk and a definite performance hog. If I wanted gadgets/widgets/modules... well I don't. And I really don't need a toolbar. I'm not surprised this was Google's next step but I try not to download the stuff I don't need. I'm a Windows OS fan but *nix ported apps are the best in my mind.

"and (I assume) Microsoft."

Not only do you assume correctly, Microsoft is going to allow their widgets to work both online (live.com - gadgets, and start.com - startlets, more (microsoftgadgets.com gadgets here) but on the user's desktop as well once Vista is released. Perhaps these gadgets will even share the same code and can live on both the desktop and live.com simultaneously.

http://www.live.com/
http://www.start.com/3/

MS did this months and months ago with both start.com and Live. Google doing this now is kinda' just sad...

Nothing to see here, folks.

Kids copy from each other in grade school. Grown up businesses don't "copy," if they see a competitor's product that shows promise, they take it, make it better (whether or not it really is better is decided "voted" on by the public with their dollars, with some help from marketing, of course ;) ), and sell it. Its what people do, its how we progress. There was a time when cars weren't started from the inside. There had to have been one company that started that trend, in which all of the others followed. Would we be better off today if only Ford (or whoever it was) cars were started from the inside, and owners of other brands had to crank start their car from the outside? Of course not. No other brand would exist. "Copying" leads to competition, which leads to better products. Google's start page is a blatent "copy" of Microsoft's http://www.start.com./ Is this bad? No. MS wasn't doing anything with it. Maybe now they will.

Both of these do exactly that:

From Google: http://www.google.com/ig
From MS: http://www.start.com/

Now there is something on the .NET platform that Microsoft is making called "Atlas". It builds on AJAX but allows a developer to write ASP.NET server controls that render AJAX-ish code. At least that's the concept, I believe. Will be nice to see how it pans out.

For what it's worth, Live.com (and Start.com before it) uses Atlas. Building Gadgets for Live.com/Start.com is a good way to get your feet wet with Atlas, though they could do a better job of providing documentation.

Actually, it is a rip off of netvibes and all of them are rip offs of myYahoo portal (only with a lot of javascript [no, i wont use THAT buzzword]).

Microsoft has another page which IMO is better than this, it is start.com. It works with firefox and it is under that domain that the new Hotmail beta service is 'hidden'.

about the Windows Live bit, it is just plain brand naming.

Hmmm.... that's strange. I thought MS wanted to kill Google with http://start.com/. Seems to be almost the same thing. Why develop two brands, two domains, two applications that seem to do the same thing? Doesn't make much sense to me.

You mean like Google Personalized Homepage was like start.com

Check it out, it's now ©2005 Microsoft.

It's clearly based on the not-thrown-together http://www.start.com/ I actually prefer start.com over what they've decided to do with live.com

Michael

Have anyone seen www.start.com? It looks very similar to www.live.com except it has been around for several months now. If you look at the bottom of start.com, it says that it's by microsoft.
[sarcasm]hm...I wonder if microsoft is feeling the pressure from Google[/sarcasm]

Google personal homepage showed up waaay after Microsoft experiments in this kind of homepage under http://start.com./ Talk about revisionist history...

http://www.start.com/

Awesome site. Microsoft is doing great work, and start is what's public right now.

Perhaps... but then shouldn't Google be ashamed for copying Microsoft's start.com with their own personalized homepage?

well, I wouldn't mind having something like start.

Ajax looks and feels tasty.

Hmm.. I have the exact opposite problem. The drag'n'drop on the customized Google page never works (and never has worked) for me in Firefox. On the other hand, MS's Start.com works fine in Firefox. Maybe it's one of the extension's I'm using, but I can't get Google to work - I can't even add new feeds to my page unless I open up IE and do it there..

http://by107w.bay107.mail.start.com/mail/mail.aspx

Looks neat, and I love the new Clippy too he's actually helpful this time!

Dunno but their Start page is quite cool, something like Netvibes but (IMHO) better. Who knows... maybe someday they will offer that service instead of the terrible MSN home page.

BTW, where are all the ads? One of the (many) reasons for me to stop using Hotmail was the animated ads and banners. I would expect those from a porn site but not from my email account. I am sure those will be there when the service goes open.

Oh! and on a sligthly OT note, I guess I wont move to Hotmail again... as in my University (somewhere in UK) the IT people blocked the hotmail URL because it was very dangerous hahahaah nice and lovely.

Who modded this interesting? this is such a troll!!

In advertising, why would it make any sense for Microsoft to make ads IE specific? Advertising is about reaching as many people as possible with relevant ads. M$ are money grubbers, not just power-mongers.

Personally, I hope the parent is right, because the one thing that it is hard for my adblock in firefox to block is the google adwords. If M$ did use active-x that would completely eliminate the problem for me :).

But it won't happen. If you have been reading /. recently MS has been coming out with new AJAX based technologies that work cross platform/browser. Take a look at their new home page previously referred to here on /. I dare say it is a lot nicer than Googles, feature-wise.

So maybe Microsoft is waking up and realizing that if they are going to compete with Google, they are going to have to abandone their "Windows is the only OS" model.

I hope they do, competition is ALWAYS good.

They can certainly copy the visible parts of Google, the products that are out (heh, mostly in beta) now.

You mean, like this?

I don't think monopoly means what you think it does.

http://start.com/1/ http://start.com/2/ http://start.com/3/

http://start.com/1/ http://start.com/2/ http://start.com/3/

http://start.com/1/ http://start.com/2/ http://start.com/3/

"but if you track the functionality and UI changes that the companies have made over the past 6 months, this has clearly been a place where Google has been following Microsoft's lead."

Maybe, but if you look at the original start.com.. http://www.start.com/1/ its just a simple search bar. The second rev http://www.start.com/2/ adds some dhtml functionality, but only the third rev, http://www.start.com/3/ adds the identical dhtml section moving feature google has... probably after google came out with theirs.

"but if you track the functionality and UI changes that the companies have made over the past 6 months, this has clearly been a place where Google has been following Microsoft's lead."

Maybe, but if you look at the original start.com.. http://www.start.com/1/ its just a simple search bar. The second rev http://www.start.com/2/ adds some dhtml functionality, but only the third rev, http://www.start.com/3/ adds the identical dhtml section moving feature google has... probably after google came out with theirs.

"but if you track the functionality and UI changes that the companies have made over the past 6 months, this has clearly been a place where Google has been following Microsoft's lead."

Maybe, but if you look at the original start.com.. http://www.start.com/1/ its just a simple search bar. The second rev http://www.start.com/2/ adds some dhtml functionality, but only the third rev, http://www.start.com/3/ adds the identical dhtml section moving feature google has... probably after google came out with theirs.

check out
http://www.start.com/1/
and
http://www.start.com/2/

check out
http://www.start.com/1/
and
http://www.start.com/2/

http://www.start.com/5

Don't know if anyone noticed, because I am not going to read through all 500+ replies but there is also a http://www.start.com/1/ and a http://www.start.com/2/ in addition to the http://www.start.com/3/

Don't know if anyone noticed, because I am not going to read through all 500+ replies but there is also a http://www.start.com/1/ and a http://www.start.com/2/ in addition to the http://www.start.com/3/

Don't know if anyone noticed, because I am not going to read through all 500+ replies but there is also a http://www.start.com/1/ and a http://www.start.com/2/ in addition to the http://www.start.com/3/

http://www.start.com/3/ have to copy the leader !

1) Is because it's full of all kinds of crap:
The following is inline javascript to convert http://start.com/3 -> http://www.start.com/3/ (can be seen by "view javascript" in the Firefox Developer Toolbar). This causes an infinite loop in any cache of the page (e.g. google's cache) ;o)
----------
var p = window.location.pathname;
var h = location.href;
if (p != "/" && p.indexOf("default.aspx") == -1 && p.charAt(p.length - 1) != '/')
      h += '/';
if (location.hostname == "start.com")
      h = h.replace("start.com","www.start.com");
if (h != location.href)
      location.replace(h);
----------

2) It's huge:
Total HTTP Requests: 47
Total Size: 264511 bytes
Total size does not count "externals" (CSS and javascript):
Javascript: 198459 bytes (why 193 KB of JavaScript on a start page?)
CSS: 49063 bytes
Taken from: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyz e/wso.php?url=http://www.start.com/3/

1) Because it's javascript you can't even go back to previous searches. Only the last search can be used.

1) Is because it's full of all kinds of crap:
The following is inline javascript to convert http://start.com/3 -> http://www.start.com/3/ (can be seen by "view javascript" in the Firefox Developer Toolbar). This causes an infinite loop in any cache of the page (e.g. google's cache) ;o)
----------
var p = window.location.pathname;
var h = location.href;
if (p != "/" && p.indexOf("default.aspx") == -1 && p.charAt(p.length - 1) != '/')
      h += '/';
if (location.hostname == "start.com")
      h = h.replace("start.com","www.start.com");
if (h != location.href)
      location.replace(h);
----------

2) It's huge:
Total HTTP Requests: 47
Total Size: 264511 bytes
Total size does not count "externals" (CSS and javascript):
Javascript: 198459 bytes (why 193 KB of JavaScript on a start page?)
CSS: 49063 bytes
Taken from: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyz e/wso.php?url=http://www.start.com/3/

1) Because it's javascript you can't even go back to previous searches. Only the last search can be used.

Note that two other versions of this page also exist, with slightly different stylings... one at /1/ and another at /2/. You can see them by clicking here and here.

Note that two other versions of this page also exist, with slightly different stylings... one at /1/ and another at /2/. You can see them by clicking here and here.

Yep. If you look at the stylesheet you'll see it contains proprietary CSS that works around the fact that Internet Explorer doesn't natively support alpha transparency in PNG images like any other modern web browser. Somewhat ironic, eh?

(I posted this as a new topic earlier. I hope I don't end up in karma hell for re-posting it as a reply like I should have...)

I work on start.com and am one of the 3 folks on the team, and wow, I thought for sure we would have been slashdotted before this :) This is my first post on slashdot, though I have been reading for several years now. I just wanted to make a few replies to the comments I've been seeing.

I've been seeing a ton of posts about how we copied google. Man you guys are tough! I'm surprised most people think this since they released their page not too long ago and we released our first version back in March. It was March 6th to be exact. I remember the date. It was my birthday :)

Here's a basic timeline which I also saw posted in another slashdot post somewhere:
- March 6th, http://start.com/1
- April 6th, http://start.com/2
- May 20th(?), google's personalized page
- June 6th, http://start.com/3

We did notice when google shipped their page in May and I have to admit we were like "darn, they have drag/drop before we do" and "man they have a gmail module, we need to get ours working". But honestly in this space we are both sooooo just scratching the surface here and there are a TON of things that can be done. I have 2 whiteboards full of stuff, like our massive todo list and crazy feature ideas. I bet their whiteboards are full too :) Seriously, the fun is just beginning.

There is a video of me and one of the other 3 members of the team at http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9022 9. We talk a little bit about the history of start and some of the development. The video is really long, but it's a good glimpse of our culture, how we started, and how we do things on the team.

Now that I look back I remember that we had shipped live to the web in late February, two weeks before we got discovered. The whole effort started back in November. We were doing a series of prototypes to show how the web can actually be fast again. I mean seriously, we have these huge pipes and fast connections and so many people are on broadband, why are we stuck downloading all this unnecessary crap like flash images, unnecessary UI that I'm not interested in, more ad content than content, just to read 3 pages of an article? So we tried some prototypes, showed it to our boss, then found an old unused domain called start.com that MSN owned and thought it would be cool to just put the code out on the web to show our friends. We put it on http://start.com/1 to make it not totally obvious, then waited to see how long it would take for someone to stumble across it. It took 2 weeks. I remember the day (remember, it was my birthday!) and coming in to work to find a ton of blog posts all over the blogosphere about it. It was pretty cool. Some guy even made a screencast of it a few days later (the site seems to be down now) in the same style that Jon Udell had done with google maps.

Anyway, sorry about the servers running slow. We're an incubation site and we just migrated onto shiny new hardware a few weeks back and we're still working out the kinks. Tonight Slashdot sent us about 15x the traffic we normally get and we've been having fun watching the servers keep up with the load. Seriously, if you got burned tonight, try it again tomorrow.

I noticed one of the posts mention that we use a cookie. Yeah we do, we use it to index your settings on the back-end. The last thing we wanted to do was slap on a huge LOGIN TO PASSPORT page before you can even do anything since a) our target audience (you guys) would probably thing that was lame and wouldn't even try the site out and b) we use start.com too and *we* think that would be lame. We want peo

(I posted this as a new topic earlier. I hope I don't end up in karma hell for re-posting it as a reply like I should have...)

I work on start.com and am one of the 3 folks on the team, and wow, I thought for sure we would have been slashdotted before this :) This is my first post on slashdot, though I have been reading for several years now. I just wanted to make a few replies to the comments I've been seeing.

I've been seeing a ton of posts about how we copied google. Man you guys are tough! I'm surprised most people think this since they released their page not too long ago and we released our first version back in March. It was March 6th to be exact. I remember the date. It was my birthday :)

Here's a basic timeline which I also saw posted in another slashdot post somewhere:
- March 6th, http://start.com/1
- April 6th, http://start.com/2
- May 20th(?), google's personalized page
- June 6th, http://start.com/3

We did notice when google shipped their page in May and I have to admit we were like "darn, they have drag/drop before we do" and "man they have a gmail module, we need to get ours working". But honestly in this space we are both sooooo just scratching the surface here and there are a TON of things that can be done. I have 2 whiteboards full of stuff, like our massive todo list and crazy feature ideas. I bet their whiteboards are full too :) Seriously, the fun is just beginning.

There is a video of me and one of the other 3 members of the team at http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9022 9. We talk a little bit about the history of start and some of the development. The video is really long, but it's a good glimpse of our culture, how we started, and how we do things on the team.

Now that I look back I remember that we had shipped live to the web in late February, two weeks before we got discovered. The whole effort started back in November. We were doing a series of prototypes to show how the web can actually be fast again. I mean seriously, we have these huge pipes and fast connections and so many people are on broadband, why are we stuck downloading all this unnecessary crap like flash images, unnecessary UI that I'm not interested in, more ad content than content, just to read 3 pages of an article? So we tried some prototypes, showed it to our boss, then found an old unused domain called start.com that MSN owned and thought it would be cool to just put the code out on the web to show our friends. We put it on http://start.com/1 to make it not totally obvious, then waited to see how long it would take for someone to stumble across it. It took 2 weeks. I remember the day (remember, it was my birthday!) and coming in to work to find a ton of blog posts all over the blogosphere about it. It was pretty cool. Some guy even made a screencast of it a few days later (the site seems to be down now) in the same style that Jon Udell had done with google maps.

Anyway, sorry about the servers running slow. We're an incubation site and we just migrated onto shiny new hardware a few weeks back and we're still working out the kinks. Tonight Slashdot sent us about 15x the traffic we normally get and we've been having fun watching the servers keep up with the load. Seriously, if you got burned tonight, try it again tomorrow.

I noticed one of the posts mention that we use a cookie. Yeah we do, we use it to index your settings on the back-end. The last thing we wanted to do was slap on a huge LOGIN TO PASSPORT page before you can even do anything since a) our target audience (you guys) would probably thing that was lame and wouldn't even try the site out and b) we use start.com too and *we* think that would be lame. We want peo

(I posted this as a new topic earlier. I hope I don't end up in karma hell for re-posting it as a reply like I should have...)

I work on start.com and am one of the 3 folks on the team, and wow, I thought for sure we would have been slashdotted before this :) This is my first post on slashdot, though I have been reading for several years now. I just wanted to make a few replies to the comments I've been seeing.

I've been seeing a ton of posts about how we copied google. Man you guys are tough! I'm surprised most people think this since they released their page not too long ago and we released our first version back in March. It was March 6th to be exact. I remember the date. It was my birthday :)

Here's a basic timeline which I also saw posted in another slashdot post somewhere:
- March 6th, http://start.com/1
- April 6th, http://start.com/2
- May 20th(?), google's personalized page
- June 6th, http://start.com/3

We did notice when google shipped their page in May and I have to admit we were like "darn, they have drag/drop before we do" and "man they have a gmail module, we need to get ours working". But honestly in this space we are both sooooo just scratching the surface here and there are a TON of things that can be done. I have 2 whiteboards full of stuff, like our massive todo list and crazy feature ideas. I bet their whiteboards are full too :) Seriously, the fun is just beginning.

There is a video of me and one of the other 3 members of the team at http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9022 9. We talk a little bit about the history of start and some of the development. The video is really long, but it's a good glimpse of our culture, how we started, and how we do things on the team.

Now that I look back I remember that we had shipped live to the web in late February, two weeks before we got discovered. The whole effort started back in November. We were doing a series of prototypes to show how the web can actually be fast again. I mean seriously, we have these huge pipes and fast connections and so many people are on broadband, why are we stuck downloading all this unnecessary crap like flash images, unnecessary UI that I'm not interested in, more ad content than content, just to read 3 pages of an article? So we tried some prototypes, showed it to our boss, then found an old unused domain called start.com that MSN owned and thought it would be cool to just put the code out on the web to show our friends. We put it on http://start.com/1 to make it not totally obvious, then waited to see how long it would take for someone to stumble across it. It took 2 weeks. I remember the day (remember, it was my birthday!) and coming in to work to find a ton of blog posts all over the blogosphere about it. It was pretty cool. Some guy even made a screencast of it a few days later (the site seems to be down now) in the same style that Jon Udell had done with google maps.

Anyway, sorry about the servers running slow. We're an incubation site and we just migrated onto shiny new hardware a few weeks back and we're still working out the kinks. Tonight Slashdot sent us about 15x the traffic we normally get and we've been having fun watching the servers keep up with the load. Seriously, if you got burned tonight, try it again tomorrow.

I noticed one of the posts mention that we use a cookie. Yeah we do, we use it to index your settings on the back-end. The last thing we wanted to do was slap on a huge LOGIN TO PASSPORT page before you can even do anything since a) our target audience (you guys) would probably thing that was lame and wouldn't even try the site out and b) we use start.com too and *we* think that would be lame. We want peo

(I posted this as a new topic earlier. I hope I don't end up in karma hell for re-posting it as a reply like I should have...)

I work on start.com and am one of the 3 folks on the team, and wow, I thought for sure we would have been slashdotted before this :) This is my first post on slashdot, though I have been reading for several years now. I just wanted to make a few replies to the comments I've been seeing.

I've been seeing a ton of posts about how we copied google. Man you guys are tough! I'm surprised most people think this since they released their page not too long ago and we released our first version back in March. It was March 6th to be exact. I remember the date. It was my birthday :)

Here's a basic timeline which I also saw posted in another slashdot post somewhere:
- March 6th, http://start.com/1
- April 6th, http://start.com/2
- May 20th(?), google's personalized page
- June 6th, http://start.com/3

We did notice when google shipped their page in May and I have to admit we were like "darn, they have drag/drop before we do" and "man they have a gmail module, we need to get ours working". But honestly in this space we are both sooooo just scratching the surface here and there are a TON of things that can be done. I have 2 whiteboards full of stuff, like our massive todo list and crazy feature ideas. I bet their whiteboards are full too :) Seriously, the fun is just beginning.

There is a video of me and one of the other 3 members of the team at http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9022 9. We talk a little bit about the history of start and some of the development. The video is really long, but it's a good glimpse of our culture, how we started, and how we do things on the team.

Now that I look back I remember that we had shipped live to the web in late February, two weeks before we got discovered. The whole effort started back in November. We were doing a series of prototypes to show how the web can actually be fast again. I mean seriously, we have these huge pipes and fast connections and so many people are on broadband, why are we stuck downloading all this unnecessary crap like flash images, unnecessary UI that I'm not interested in, more ad content than content, just to read 3 pages of an article? So we tried some prototypes, showed it to our boss, then found an old unused domain called start.com that MSN owned and thought it would be cool to just put the code out on the web to show our friends. We put it on http://start.com/1 to make it not totally obvious, then waited to see how long it would take for someone to stumble across it. It took 2 weeks. I remember the day (remember, it was my birthday!) and coming in to work to find a ton of blog posts all over the blogosphere about it. It was pretty cool. Some guy even made a screencast of it a few days later (the site seems to be down now) in the same style that Jon Udell had done with google maps.

Anyway, sorry about the servers running slow. We're an incubation site and we just migrated onto shiny new hardware a few weeks back and we're still working out the kinks. Tonight Slashdot sent us about 15x the traffic we normally get and we've been having fun watching the servers keep up with the load. Seriously, if you got burned tonight, try it again tomorrow.

I noticed one of the posts mention that we use a cookie. Yeah we do, we use it to index your settings on the back-end. The last thing we wanted to do was slap on a huge LOGIN TO PASSPORT page before you can even do anything since a) our target audience (you guys) would probably thing that was lame and wouldn't even try the site out and b) we use start.com too and *we* think that would be lame. We want peo

I work on start.com and am one of the 3 folks on the team, and wow, I thought for sure we would have been slashdotted before this :) This is my first post on slashdot, though I have been reading for several years now. I just wanted to make a few replies to the comments I've been seeing.

I've been seeing a ton of posts about how we copied google. Man you guys are tough! I'm surprised most people think this since they released their page not too long ago and we released our first version back in March. It was March 6th to be exact. I remember the date. It was my birthday :)

Here's a basic timeline which I also saw posted in another slashdot post somewhere:
  - March 6th, http://start.com/1
  - April 6th, http://start.com/2
  - May 20th(?), google's personalized page
  - June 6th, http://start.com/3

We did notice when google shipped their page in May and I have to admit we were like "darn, they have drag/drop before we do" and "man they have a gmail module, we need to get ours working". But honestly in this space we are both sooooo just scratching the surface here and there are a TON of things that can be done. I have 2 whiteboards full of stuff, like our massive todo list and crazy feature ideas. I bet their whiteboards are full too :) Seriously, the fun is just beginning.

There is a video of me and one of the other 3 members of the team at http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9022 9. We talk a little bit about the history of start and some of the development. The video is really long, but it's a good glimpse of our culture, how we started, and how we do things on the team.

Now that I look back I remember that we had shipped live to the web in late February, two weeks before we got discovered. The whole effort started back in November. We were doing a series of prototypes to show how the web can actually be fast again. I mean seriously, we have these huge pipes and fast connections and so many people are on broadband, why are we stuck downloading all this unnecessary crap like flash images, unnecessary UI that I'm not interested in, more ad content than content, just to read 3 pages of an article? So we tried some prototypes, showed it to our boss, then found an old unused domain called start.com that MSN owned and thought it would be cool to just put the code out on the web to show our friends. We put it on http://start.com/1 to make it not totally obvious, then waited to see how long it would take for someone to stumble across it. It took 2 weeks. I remember the day (remember, it was my birthday!) and coming in to work to find a ton of blog posts all over the blogosphere about it. It was pretty cool. Some guy even made a screencast of it a few days later (the site seems to be down now) in the same style that Jon Udell had done with google maps.

Anyway, sorry about the servers running slow. We're an incubation site and we just migrated onto shiny new hardware a few weeks back and we're still working out the kinks. Tonight Slashdot sent us about 15x the traffic we normally get and we've been having fun watching the servers keep up with the load. Seriously, if you got burned tonight, try it again tomorrow.

I noticed one of the posts mention that we use a cookie. Yeah we do, we use it to index your settings on the back-end. The last thing we wanted to do was slap on a huge LOGIN TO PASSPORT page before you can even do anything since a) our target audience (you guys) would probably thing that was lame and wouldn't even try the site out and b) we use start.com too and *we* think that would be lame. We want people to check it out, kick the tires, give it a whirl, etc and a simple cookie works pretty well for now.

Oh yeah and we fixed the nbsp thing. Oops, duh! Sorry about that.

Over and out,
steve

I work on start.com and am one of the 3 folks on the team, and wow, I thought for sure we would have been slashdotted before this :) This is my first post on slashdot, though I have been reading for several years now. I just wanted to make a few replies to the comments I've been seeing.

I've been seeing a ton of posts about how we copied google. Man you guys are tough! I'm surprised most people think this since they released their page not too long ago and we released our first version back in March. It was March 6th to be exact. I remember the date. It was my birthday :)

Here's a basic timeline which I also saw posted in another slashdot post somewhere:
  - March 6th, http://start.com/1
  - April 6th, http://start.com/2
  - May 20th(?), google's personalized page
  - June 6th, http://start.com/3

We did notice when google shipped their page in May and I have to admit we were like "darn, they have drag/drop before we do" and "man they have a gmail module, we need to get ours working". But honestly in this space we are both sooooo just scratching the surface here and there are a TON of things that can be done. I have 2 whiteboards full of stuff, like our massive todo list and crazy feature ideas. I bet their whiteboards are full too :) Seriously, the fun is just beginning.

There is a video of me and one of the other 3 members of the team at http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9022 9. We talk a little bit about the history of start and some of the development. The video is really long, but it's a good glimpse of our culture, how we started, and how we do things on the team.

Now that I look back I remember that we had shipped live to the web in late February, two weeks before we got discovered. The whole effort started back in November. We were doing a series of prototypes to show how the web can actually be fast again. I mean seriously, we have these huge pipes and fast connections and so many people are on broadband, why are we stuck downloading all this unnecessary crap like flash images, unnecessary UI that I'm not interested in, more ad content than content, just to read 3 pages of an article? So we tried some prototypes, showed it to our boss, then found an old unused domain called start.com that MSN owned and thought it would be cool to just put the code out on the web to show our friends. We put it on http://start.com/1 to make it not totally obvious, then waited to see how long it would take for someone to stumble across it. It took 2 weeks. I remember the day (remember, it was my birthday!) and coming in to work to find a ton of blog posts all over the blogosphere about it. It was pretty cool. Some guy even made a screencast of it a few days later (the site seems to be down now) in the same style that Jon Udell had done with google maps.

Anyway, sorry about the servers running slow. We're an incubation site and we just migrated onto shiny new hardware a few weeks back and we're still working out the kinks. Tonight Slashdot sent us about 15x the traffic we normally get and we've been having fun watching the servers keep up with the load. Seriously, if you got burned tonight, try it again tomorrow.

I noticed one of the posts mention that we use a cookie. Yeah we do, we use it to index your settings on the back-end. The last thing we wanted to do was slap on a huge LOGIN TO PASSPORT page before you can even do anything since a) our target audience (you guys) would probably thing that was lame and wouldn't even try the site out and b) we use start.com too and *we* think that would be lame. We want people to check it out, kick the tires, give it a whirl, etc and a simple cookie works pretty well for now.

Oh yeah and we fixed the nbsp thing. Oops, duh! Sorry about that.

Over and out,
steve

I work on start.com and am one of the 3 folks on the team, and wow, I thought for sure we would have been slashdotted before this :) This is my first post on slashdot, though I have been reading for several years now. I just wanted to make a few replies to the comments I've been seeing.

I've been seeing a ton of posts about how we copied google. Man you guys are tough! I'm surprised most people think this since they released their page not too long ago and we released our first version back in March. It was March 6th to be exact. I remember the date. It was my birthday :)

Here's a basic timeline which I also saw posted in another slashdot post somewhere:
  - March 6th, http://start.com/1
  - April 6th, http://start.com/2
  - May 20th(?), google's personalized page
  - June 6th, http://start.com/3

We did notice when google shipped their page in May and I have to admit we were like "darn, they have drag/drop before we do" and "man they have a gmail module, we need to get ours working". But honestly in this space we are both sooooo just scratching the surface here and there are a TON of things that can be done. I have 2 whiteboards full of stuff, like our massive todo list and crazy feature ideas. I bet their whiteboards are full too :) Seriously, the fun is just beginning.

There is a video of me and one of the other 3 members of the team at http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9022 9. We talk a little bit about the history of start and some of the development. The video is really long, but it's a good glimpse of our culture, how we started, and how we do things on the team.

Now that I look back I remember that we had shipped live to the web in late February, two weeks before we got discovered. The whole effort started back in November. We were doing a series of prototypes to show how the web can actually be fast again. I mean seriously, we have these huge pipes and fast connections and so many people are on broadband, why are we stuck downloading all this unnecessary crap like flash images, unnecessary UI that I'm not interested in, more ad content than content, just to read 3 pages of an article? So we tried some prototypes, showed it to our boss, then found an old unused domain called start.com that MSN owned and thought it would be cool to just put the code out on the web to show our friends. We put it on http://start.com/1 to make it not totally obvious, then waited to see how long it would take for someone to stumble across it. It took 2 weeks. I remember the day (remember, it was my birthday!) and coming in to work to find a ton of blog posts all over the blogosphere about it. It was pretty cool. Some guy even made a screencast of it a few days later (the site seems to be down now) in the same style that Jon Udell had done with google maps.

Anyway, sorry about the servers running slow. We're an incubation site and we just migrated onto shiny new hardware a few weeks back and we're still working out the kinks. Tonight Slashdot sent us about 15x the traffic we normally get and we've been having fun watching the servers keep up with the load. Seriously, if you got burned tonight, try it again tomorrow.

I noticed one of the posts mention that we use a cookie. Yeah we do, we use it to index your settings on the back-end. The last thing we wanted to do was slap on a huge LOGIN TO PASSPORT page before you can even do anything since a) our target audience (you guys) would probably thing that was lame and wouldn't even try the site out and b) we use start.com too and *we* think that would be lame. We want people to check it out, kick the tires, give it a whirl, etc and a simple cookie works pretty well for now.

Oh yeah and we fixed the nbsp thing. Oops, duh! Sorry about that.

Over and out,
steve

I work on start.com and am one of the 3 folks on the team, and wow, I thought for sure we would have been slashdotted before this :) This is my first post on slashdot, though I have been reading for several years now. I just wanted to make a few replies to the comments I've been seeing.

I've been seeing a ton of posts about how we copied google. Man you guys are tough! I'm surprised most people think this since they released their page not too long ago and we released our first version back in March. It was March 6th to be exact. I remember the date. It was my birthday :)

Here's a basic timeline which I also saw posted in another slashdot post somewhere:
  - March 6th, http://start.com/1
  - April 6th, http://start.com/2
  - May 20th(?), google's personalized page
  - June 6th, http://start.com/3

We did notice when google shipped their page in May and I have to admit we were like "darn, they have drag/drop before we do" and "man they have a gmail module, we need to get ours working". But honestly in this space we are both sooooo just scratching the surface here and there are a TON of things that can be done. I have 2 whiteboards full of stuff, like our massive todo list and crazy feature ideas. I bet their whiteboards are full too :) Seriously, the fun is just beginning.

There is a video of me and one of the other 3 members of the team at http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9022 9. We talk a little bit about the history of start and some of the development. The video is really long, but it's a good glimpse of our culture, how we started, and how we do things on the team.

Now that I look back I remember that we had shipped live to the web in late February, two weeks before we got discovered. The whole effort started back in November. We were doing a series of prototypes to show how the web can actually be fast again. I mean seriously, we have these huge pipes and fast connections and so many people are on broadband, why are we stuck downloading all this unnecessary crap like flash images, unnecessary UI that I'm not interested in, more ad content than content, just to read 3 pages of an article? So we tried some prototypes, showed it to our boss, then found an old unused domain called start.com that MSN owned and thought it would be cool to just put the code out on the web to show our friends. We put it on http://start.com/1 to make it not totally obvious, then waited to see how long it would take for someone to stumble across it. It took 2 weeks. I remember the day (remember, it was my birthday!) and coming in to work to find a ton of blog posts all over the blogosphere about it. It was pretty cool. Some guy even made a screencast of it a few days later (the site seems to be down now) in the same style that Jon Udell had done with google maps.

Anyway, sorry about the servers running slow. We're an incubation site and we just migrated onto shiny new hardware a few weeks back and we're still working out the kinks. Tonight Slashdot sent us about 15x the traffic we normally get and we've been having fun watching the servers keep up with the load. Seriously, if you got burned tonight, try it again tomorrow.

I noticed one of the posts mention that we use a cookie. Yeah we do, we use it to index your settings on the back-end. The last thing we wanted to do was slap on a huge LOGIN TO PASSPORT page before you can even do anything since a) our target audience (you guys) would probably thing that was lame and wouldn't even try the site out and b) we use start.com too and *we* think that would be lame. We want people to check it out, kick the tires, give it a whirl, etc and a simple cookie works pretty well for now.

Oh yeah and we fixed the nbsp thing. Oops, duh! Sorry about that.

Over and out,
steve