Start.com News: Blog

all good things come to an end!

Tue, 15 May 2007 21:25:56 GMT

I am listening to 'All good things come to an end' by Nelly Furtado as I write this blog post. No, not planned. It just happened to play randomly on my playlist - timely for this post.

This is a bittersweet moment as I reflect on what start.com accomplished from it's inception in February 2005, helping pioneer ajax homepages and gadgets on the web. We accomplished great things both in terms of technology as well as being an agile small team and connecting with our customers. A successful incubation project that evolved to live.com. Unfortunately it is now time for us to retire start.com as our incubation ground for live.com. Effective next Tuesday, 5/22/07, start.com will redirect to live.com.

Are you an active start.com customer and want to keep your feeds?

1. if you don't have the 'add content' gadget, add it by hovering on the logo and clicking on 'add feeds and gadgets'

2. click on 'advanced' within the 'add content' gadget

3. at the bottom you'll see the option for 'click here to export your feed subscriptions to OPML', click on 'here'

4. save the file locally

5. you can import this file to live.com or your favorite rss reader

To import to live.com:

1. click on 'add stuff' in the upper left hand corner

2. click on 'advanced options'

3. browse for the opml file next to the 'import OPML file' option

4. once imported you'll find your subscriptions under 'my stuff' within the 'subscriptions' folder

Sanaz Ahari on behalf of the start.com team

Lead Program Manager, Live Search

we're hiring developers

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 07:42:42 GMT

Want to work on one of the coolest projects at Microsoft? Are you passionate about technology? Are you fascinated by fast, scalable, software? Are you excited about scrum and agile development? Do you want to take ideas from concept to live on the web in just a few hours or days?

If you are an engineer who wants to set new grounds in innovative technology -- we want you on LIVE.COM. The team is looking for a highly qualified engineers to build the next set of services that will power the LIVE.COM web platform and beyond.

Candidates must have a proven track record of shipping high scale/high performance systems, middle tier, database design, performance tuning, DHTML and javascript, C#/C++/Java. Candidates must also have a pulse on what's hot, trendy and ground-breaking in the web world and be a great team player.

send us your resume..

announcing live.com beta

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 18:34:16 GMT

check out live.com... and learn more about live on our live.com blog...

quick overview of changes:

- mail inbox (get your hotmail and windows live mail) (this one should work around 4 pm PST today)

- better search experience (inline answers, spelling correction)

- the pop-up is gone :)

check it out for yourself.

thanks!

update: wanna port your feeds from start to live.. please use OPML, more details here.

no more stealing your focus!

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 04:22:27 GMT

Hi folks, we just propped a simple change we think you might like. A lot of you have been sending us feedback about how the search box steals your cursor away when the page loads. We hear you, and we hate this too! We've updated the code so that we no longer steal your focus. If you want to type a search query, you can just start typing anywhere on the page and we'll automatically put the focus in the search box - no need to click in the search box (thanks to our friends on the msn.com team for this one).

Hope you like it!

view your gadgets on start.com and new shopping gadget

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 01:11:18 GMT

did you build a gadget, but it only worked on start.com/pdc and not on start.com... well now you can view all your gadgets on http://www.start.com and import new ones through our add content module.

also check out our new shopping gadget powered by msn shopping - expand the sidebar and click on shopping under gadgets. you can search for any items you like,subscribe to a search query (this can essentially be a light fare tracker for anything you want to buy) and even view your recent searches.

Start.com Browser Support

Mon, 26 Sep 2005 07:12:53 GMT

As explained per Scott Isaac's:

Quote

Start.com currently runs in the latest versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer (although there are some bugs in some versions). We've received feedback questioning why we don't support additional browsers. The browsers we support is currently a technology driven decision. We want to support additional browsers, but not all browsers support the necessary standards. I am going to explain a few technical issues we have faced that are critical to us expanding Start.com's support.

First, the browser must support the DHTML event and object model. I am not going to list the specific standards, but assuming a browser can meet the following three requirements, the remaining support will most likely be sufficient.

Support for dynamically downloading code
We download most scripts by dynamically creating SCRIPT tags. Unfortunately, we have found some browsers do not expose any events or properties that we can use to detect the script has been loaded. Specifically, we have not found an appropriate onload event or readystate-type poperty in Safari.
Support for adding custom properties to base DOM objects
Our goal is to avoid writing browser specific code within our application implementation. To accomplish this, our framework equalizes the object models and even extends built-in behavior by extending the prototypes of the base DOM objects. For example, we add properties to the base HTMLElement and Event objects. Specifically, we have not found a way to do this in Opera.
Support for parsing and retrieving xml tags
We embed custom tags into our documents. These tags need to be properly parsed into their appropriate tree. For example, in the HTML document we may have tags such as:
<web:binding selector=".list" type="Demo.List"><web:defaults></web:defaults></web:binding>
We need to be able to query and extract these elements, their associated attributes, and any child elements.

These represent the typical requirements that have blocked us from running on a larger set of browsers. If you represent a browser that does not run Start.com, we would appreciate any help resolving these issues. You can reach me directly via the e-mail address listed in my profile, or you can contact the start.com team directly. For the rest of you, we are working hard at enabling Start.com on the widest array of browsers and devices.

start.com goes international

Wed, 21 Sep 2005 07:24:54 GMT

Salut! start.com has been released in 9 markets :)

JA-JP, EN-US, ES-ES, EN-UK, FR-FR, IT-IT, ES-ES, DE-DE and EN-AU. You will now see a language option in the upper right hand corner and we will also respect your browser language/locale setting. This has been one of our most requested customer features and we hope to expand to more markets soon.

As usual, we want to hear from you. Please send us your feedback, email startfb or leave a comment.

enjoy! and tell all your friends abroad.

passport has been fixed

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 02:46:53 GMT

please accept our apologies, we were having some passport issues that have now been fixed.

microsoft gadgets and start.com/developer

Wed, 14 Sep 2005 20:15:08 GMT

you can now extend your start.com experience using gadgets...

links to go to:

- visit http://start.com/developer to learn more about gadgets and how you can get started right away..

- add your gadgets through http://start.com/pdc

- Scott Isaacs has been posting some very useful technical articles on gadgets and atlas, here.

- http://www.microsoftgadgets.com outlines microsoft gadgets with gadgets for windows sidebar, start.com and sideshow.

enjoy!

www.start.com released (no more "/3")

Thu, 01 Sep 2005 16:47:43 GMT

late last night we removed the "/3" from start.com - it's now available without puzzles or obfuscation, at http://www.start.com (although still a "preview")

primarily driven by your feedback, here are some of the highlights:

feed read/unread support
more/fewer headlines
auto-refresh for feeds
many improvemens on:
- look and feel
- feed subscriptions
- default experience
- sidebar behavior
as we as many bug fixes

please send us your feedback (comment or email startfb) - tells us what you like about start and what you don't like. share your ideas and suggestions for new startlets, ux, ads, functionality, etc. we value your input, no feedback is left unread :)

weather startlet is now international

Tue, 16 Aug 2005 04:36:31 GMT

apologies for our delayed weather forecasts during the past few days... we've fixed that issue and now we also have international weather support for start. type in a city or us zip code, enjoy! :) send us your feedback.

note: celsius support will be added soon.

update: we didn't have celsius support for roughly an hour, and were called out on it by quite a few emails :) it's now added. enjoy :)

changes to sidebar, add experience and more

Wed, 10 Aug 2005 09:38:17 GMT

we just released a few changes that we hope will enhance your start experience.

sidebar changes:

- you'll find a new organization to the sidebar, with a section for 'my content' as well as top feeds, startlets (our widgets), staff picks and categories

- add content is now more discoverable and includes search integration. try pinning this module, if you would like add content to be more accessible.

- now you can drag and drop your content from the sidebar to your start page

rss modules:

- the headlines now wrap instead of being truncated after one line

- each headline now includes a direct link to the source while pinned

favorites:

- try the favorites startlet to manage your favorite sites

please send us your feedback by commenting or emailing startfb@microsoft.com

now you can roam your start page

Tue, 09 Aug 2005 23:59:38 GMT

it took a few hundred feedback emails to finally add this :) we've actually been planning it for a while, sorry it took so long.

now you can roam your start settings with your passport account:

only have one machine and don't want to have a passport account - no problem, keep on using start as usual and we will remember your cookie settings

want to roam your settings to different machines - sign in and we will associate your current settings with your passport account.

enjoy and please send us feedback!

update: fixed for firefox

msn blog map and more

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 03:15:54 GMT

Scott Isaacs, the architect for start's framework, has written a really cool startlet that showcases integration with Virtual Earth; it's a map of some MSN employees that are blogging. go to http://start.com/3, expand the sidebar and under staff picks click on MSN Blog Map. Scott has talked about the startlet here.

This showcases rich integrated components within start - as Steve and I alluded to on our Channel 9 video we'd like to enable developers to build on top of this framework eventually.

other news:

- you can now navigate through search results by clicking on next and previous. try pinning the search results and navigating them while pinned, it's fun :)

- i'm sorry to say that despite everyone being a big fan of the puzzle we've removed it ;) now you can just type http://start.com/3, http://start.com/myweb or http://start.com/myw3b

more on start: OPML support and popular feeds

Fri, 22 Jul 2005 01:55:43 GMT

we just shipped OPML support on start - sorry for the delay. we know that a lot of our users wanted this feature since june 3rd, when we first shipped /myw3b.

expand the sidebar, click on add feeds and upload your existing OPML file or export your feeds from start...

also check out popular feeds on the sidebar, these feeds are sorted based on most frequently read feeds by our users, realtime data - pretty cool stuff :)

july 18th updates on start.com/myw3b

Tue, 19 Jul 2005 19:50:02 GMT

yesterday we released a few updates on http://start.com/myw3b :

- tabbed search results

now for every search query we give you web, news and rss results (more types coming soon)

this mean that you don't need to do seperate searches for each type.

something cool with the rss results is that you can just subscribe to a feed by clicking on 'subscribe' and it gets added to your start feeds...

- new stylesheets

check out ice, granite and ocean... eventually we want out users to be able to define their own stylesheets too

- just hit ESC to close your modules, you don't have to click on the 'x' button anymore

we've also fixed some bugs:

- the home link is gone, and now we don't replace your dashboard with a folder's content when you click on its name through the sidebar. we also fixed a lot of the firefox bugs, like drag and drop and weather and stock

there are some other bugs that we're working on:

- tabbed search in firefox isn't functioning

- the first time you subscribe or search the list in teh sidebar doesn't refresh appropriately

update: the aforementioned bugs have been fixed :)

start.com/3

Sun, 12 Jun 2005 10:23:34 GMT

as many of you may be aware of, a new of version of start was recently released:

a preview of start.com/3 was released on june 3rd at 6:30 pm:
a blend of /1 and /2 and your feedback. the highlights include new UI, search results/history integration, overlay module, drag and drop
UI facelift was released on june 8th at 9:00 pm:
a cleaner look and feel with a softer color scheme and much less clutter as well as a much improved drag and drop experience

this is still a preview as we have some issues that we still need to resolve, mainly:

firefox support
opml import
roaming
improved add content experience
improved left pane navigation

keep sending us your feedback... we love feedback.

apologies about the lag for this entry, we promise to update this space more frequently. we are also working on a community discussion board.

sanaz ahari
start.com program manager

Support for Firefox version 1.0.3

Wed, 20 Apr 2005 21:50:19 GMT

The recent release of Firefox version 1.0.3 had some security fixes that broke parts of the start.com framework. We've identified the issues and have added workarounds to bring it back in line. Thanks to our chief javascript and DHTML wrangler Scott Isaacs for making it all good again!

Start.com/1: Added support for increasing/decreasing # of headlines

Sat, 26 Mar 2005 08:30:50 GMT

Added support for increasing and decreasing the number of headlines in a module. There is no global setting, but the number of headlines are remembered for each module across sessions. If the feed is listed in My Feeds, the number of headlines will be remembered each time you open a new module.
Fixed a bug that was causing images not to be displayed in search results
Fixed an encoding issue in search results
Added collapse/expand buttons to the bottom of the module when 1 or more headlines are opened.
Fixed a bug that was causing the sidebar entries not to be sorted correctly in Firefox.
Fixed a bug that was causing double-clicks to be handled incorrectly in Firefox

Development shifting to v3

Sat, 26 Mar 2005 01:01:41 GMT

Next week, we'll be shifting our attention to our next prototype, so we won't be making many changes to /1 or /2 for the next few weeks. Taking your feedback into account, we'll be trying to meld v1 and v2. We'll post an announcement when it's ready to see, and we'll look forward to hearing what you think!

Start.com/1: Fixed a bug where some ATOM feeds were not displaying content properly

Wed, 23 Mar 2005 00:58:44 GMT

Fixed a bug that was causing the content of ATOM feeds to be ignored. See http://minimsft.blogspot.com/atom.xml for an example (should work now)

Start.com/1: Added URL link for roaming your page

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 22:11:15 GMT

Added a URL link (at the bottom of the page) that can be used to access the page from another machine. Use it to sync your page across multiple machines.
Added "Loading..." indicator to top of page

Start.com/1: Added support for importing OPML

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 23:50:10 GMT

Added support for importing OPML files. Note that while the folder structure of the OPML is preserved on the server, you'll only see your feeds display as a flat list on the client for now.
Fixed a bug that was preventing long URLs from being added when adding feeds by URL

New Start.com news feed

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 04:23:00 GMT

We've added a news feed to let folks keep up to date with our latest changes. We'll be using it primarily as a changelog so that folks don't have to keep checking back to see what's new. You can get an RSS feed of the site at the URL below:

http://spaces.msn.com/members/startcom/feed.rss

Start.com/1: Title of feed module now hyperlinked

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 04:22:37 GMT

The title of each feed module is now hyperlinked and also gets updated with the title in the RSS if it's different

Start.com/1: Moved to back-end store solution

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 04:22:10 GMT

Moved from cookie-based solution to back-end store for feeds and preferences
Removed the restriction on the number of feeds that can be added
Added the ability to delete items from the My Feeds and Recent Searches lists
Show search history in correct order
Lots of fit and finish and other cosmetic changes

Start.com/1: Added firefox support

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 04:21:26 GMT

Added support for Firefox