December 22, 2004
@ 05:27 PM

It seems there's been some recent hubbub in the world of podcasting about how to attach multiple binary files to a single post in an RSS feed In a post entitled Multiple-enclosures on RSS items? Dave Winer weighs in on the issue. He writes

This question comes up from time to time, and I've resisted answering it directly, thinking that anyone who really read the spec would come to the conclusion that RSS allows zero or one enclosures per item, and no more. The same is true for all other sub-elements of item, except category, where multiple elements are explicitly allowed. The spec refers to "the enclosure" in the singular. Regardless, some people persist in thinking that you may have more than one enclosure per item.

Okay, let's play it out. So if I have more than one enclosure per item, how do I specify the publication date for each enclosure? How do I specify the title, author, a link to comments, a description perhaps, or a guid? The people who want multiple enclosures suggest schemes that are so complicated that they're reduced to hand-waving before they get to the spec, which I would love to read, if it could be written. Some times some things are just too hard to do. This is one of them.

And there's a reason why it's too hard. Because you're throwing out the value of RSS and then trying to figure out how to bring it back. There's no need for items any more, so you might as well get rid of them. At the top level of channel would be a series of enclosures, and then underneath each enclosure, all the meta-data. Voila, problem solved. Only what have you actually solved? You've just re-created RSS, but instead of calling the main elements "item" we now call them "enclosure".

The value of RSS is fairly self evident to me but it seems that given the amount of people who keep wanting to reinvent the wheel it may not be as clear to others. As someone who used to work on core XML technologies at Microsoft, the value of XML was obvious to me. It allowed developers to agree to use the same data format for information interchange which led to a proliferation of a wide and uniform set of tools for working with data formats. XML is not an optimal format for most of the tasks it is used for but it more than makes up for this with the plethora of tools and technologies that exist for processing XML.  

My expectation about XML was always that the software industry would move on to agreeing on other higher level protocols built on XML for application information interchange. So I've always been frustrated to see many attempts by various parties, including the W3C with efforts such as XML 1.1 and binary XML, take us steps back by wanting to fragment the interoperability promise of XML.

RSS is a wonderful example of the higher level of interoperability that can be built upon XML formats. Instead of information sources using various incompatible mechanisms for providing information to end users such as NOAA's SOAP web service and the Microsoft.com web services which each require a separate custom application to consume them, sites can all standardize on RSS. This standardization creates an ecosystem of applications that produce and consume RSS feeds which is a lot larger than what would exist for each site specific web services or market specific XML syndication formats.  Specifically, it allows for the evolution of the digital information hub where users can view data from the various information sources they care about (blogs, news, weather reports, etc) in their choice of applications. 

Additionally, RSS is extensible. This means that even if the core elements and attributes do not satisfy all the requirements of a particular problem domain, then domain-specific information can be added to the feed. This allows for regular consumers of RSS to still be able to consume the content while domain specific applications can give users a richer experience. This is a much better solution for both content producers and consumers than coming up with domain specific applications.

As a user I want less formats not more. I want my email to come in my RSS aggregator, I want my favorite newsgroups to show up in my RSS aggregator, I'm tired of having a separate application for what is essentially the same kind of data. In fact, it seems Google agrees with me as evidenced by them exposing XML feeds for your GMail inbox and for USENET newsgroups via Google Groups. Unfortunately, if you have a plain old RSS reader, you can't view these feeds and instead have to find an aggregator that supports Atom 0.3. Two steps forward, one step back.

We need less data interchange formats not more. It is better for content producers, better for end users and better for developers of applications that use these formats. Existing problems in syndication should focus on how to make the existing formats work for us instead of inventing new formats. 

Vive la RSS. 


 

Categories: Syndication Technology | XML

Tom has a post entitled MSN Messenger contact card problem where he writes

When MSN Spaces first became available, I signed up for a test space, not knowing what I would finally end up with.  I liked it and thought it was cool that from MSN Messenger 7 beta, you could navigate to my Space from my contact card.

I deleted my first Space and created this one, having decided I would maintain it and wanted a fresh start.  ("MrTom" as a Space URL was already taken, unfortunately...).  But know MSN Messenger still displays my original, deleted Space, and clicking the links takes you to a 'page unreachable' error.  Ugh.  Restarting messenger, changing my messenger profile, waiting a day or two didn't fix this.

I first contacted messenger tech support and asked "how do I" fix this, and they gave me some nonsense about changing my display name.  They didn't understand my problem.  This is probably because "how do I" questions get routed to the most basic tech support pool.  Now I've contacted the "I need something fixed" pool, and gotten a good response.  They don't understand the issue, but they're looking into it and will let me know.  That's all I expect for the interactions between two beta products.  I'm crossing my fingers they can fix this without me deleting my site and recreating my passport. :)

For now, only the most random of people might read my blog, rather than my messenger buddies.

This problem typically occurs because MSN Messenger has information about the deleted Space cached. A tip I got from the MSN Messenger folks is to clear your browser cache and delete the contents of the folder C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Application Data\Microsoft\MSN Messenger. This resolves the problem in most cases.

It should be noted that deleting that folder deletes purchased MSN Messenger content such as emoticons, backgrounds and theme packs. If you've purchased content for MSN Messenger and are having the problems mentioned above do not use the above advice as a way to solve your problems. Instead, contact tech support for alternate solutions.


 

Categories: MSN

December 20, 2004
@ 11:40 PM

I've read Robert Scoble's Dear Bill Gates: can we create an interesting music player? post and the ensuing flood of negative  feedback with some interest. The core ideas of the post are fairly naive but do an interesting job of exposing the prejudices and internal biases of both Robert Scoble and many of his readers who responded. The core ideas of Roberts post were

  1. Microsoft should get in the music player business or pressure some OEMs to listen to their design suggestions.

  2. Get big name celebrities to endorse it

  3. Try and ship it in time for next year's back to school season

  4. create a marketting blitz around it

  5. blog about it

The ideas in itself except for the part about blogging aren't really original and are the kind of things that would come up in any 30 minute brainstorming session about what one would do if they wanted to compete with Apple's iPod. I'm also quite skeptical that blogging about a hardware product will make me any more likely to buy it over an existing market leader. There is no blog by the Apple iPod team or the TiVo team yet I love both products and wouldn't consider alternatives even though there are Microsoft employees who blog who constantly evangelize competing products.

The rest of the ideas are either impractical (even if Microsoft wanted it couldn't get in the music player business in less than six months and OEMs aren't under Microsoft's control when it comes to their product design) or common sense (getting celebrity endorsements).

What I find interesting is the intensity of the reaction to this post.

One reaction which is obvious in hindsight is the assumption in this post that Microsoft shouldn't abide the fact that Apple is dominating a market it isn't directly engaged in. This is such a natural way of thinking of for Microsoft people ("we should be number 1 in every software/hardware/technology related market") that it is often surprising for non-Microserfs when they first encounter the mentality.

Then there are those who thinks Scoble dissed the Windows Media team by (a) touting such obvious ideas as too revolutionary for them to have come up with and (b) implying that they are failing. I think these people are being a tad bit sensitive. However I also think it was unwise of Robert to be so dismissive of the efforts of the folks working in this area at Microsoft. Given that his day job involves getting product teams to open up to him on Channel 9, he isn't going to get much of cooperation from them if he keeps knocking their efforts. Another reason is that you never know who you'll end up working with. I remember once writing that MSN Messenger was one of the software applications I cannot stand only to get a rebuke from Scoble to make the post more constructive which I did. A year and a half later, and I'm on the team that owns the server for MSN Messenger. I have lots of little stories like this just from my experiences in the past three years at Microsoft. I definitely weigh my thoughts more carefully before posting anything negative about products or technologies in the software industry in general.

For a while I've been frustrated by my experience as an XBox owner. I can't get games like Transformers Armada and DragonBall Z: Budokai at all while games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas won't show up until 6 months after they've been out on Playstaton 2. However I've never thought of posting an open letter to Bill Gates on my blog with a proposal to use celebrity endorsements, partnerships with game publishers and blogging to counter the dominance of Playstation 2 in the console market.

Sometimes I wonder if that is a virtue or a vice. ;)


 

Categories: Life in the B0rg Cube

December 19, 2004
@ 02:06 AM

The longer I have my AudioVox SMT 5600 the more I begin to understand what  Russell Beattie has been preaching all these years. Yesterday I attended the Phoenix Suns vs. Seattle Sonics game at Key Arena. In between the 1st and 2nd quarters they were playing some songs by Lil Jon (having gone to school in Atlanta I smile whenever I hear "Skeet Skeet" in public) then lo and behold I notice Lil Jon below sitting courtside. My date informed me that he was scheduled to be in concert later that night.

I quickly navigated to http://www.ticketmaster.com on my phone to see if I could get some tickets but it seems the site doesn't support mobile browsers. I've slowly begun to get hooked on having Internet access with me wherever I am. Email, traffic reports, movie times and more can now be checked anytime and anywhere. How have I managed without a SmartPhone all this time?


 

Categories: Technology

I saw a recent post from Dave Winer berating Yahoo! where he wrote

Yahoo is the strangest most jealous and behind-the-scenes plotting and scheming of tech companies. When any of the other "giants" moves in RSS space I get plenty of advance notice so that I can help them promote it, maybe even make it better before it's announced. Yahoo, as a company seems jealous and insecure, seems to have as a goal, replacing me. Hey it's been tried before, probably isn't worth the trouble. And it's amazing for all the lack of respect, how much of my (unpatented) work they're using to reshape their company. If I didn't know better I might think that someone inside the company is claiming credit for my work and doesn't want the boss to know. ";->"

I wasn't sure what this post was about so I did a little Googling and came upon a post on the atom-syntax mailing list entitled Yahoo and "Media RSS" which points out that Yahoo! has created a specification entitled "Media RSS" Specification Version .9 (DRAFT). I found it interesting that Yahoo! is throwing its weight behind a spec to replace the current mechanisms used for podcasting. I am not surprised that Dave Winer was irritated especially since some of the stuff in the spec seems extremely questionable (the media:people is a single element that can contain multiple people separated by the '|' character, attributes like playerWidth & playerHeight that are supposed to control how big the media player window used to consume content should be, etc).

However before getting deeper into the Yahoo! specification I stumbled on a post by Danny Ayers on the atom-syntax mailing list which expressed some confusion about how XML vocabularies are defined

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks a little broken:

<media:content url="http://www.foo.com/movie.mov"; fileSize="12216320"
type="video/quicktime"
    playerUrl="http://www.foo.com/player?id=1111"; playerHeight="200"
playerWidth="400"
    isDefault="true" expression="full" bitrate="128" duration="185">

The attributes aren't namespace-qualified, yet aren't defined in the
RSS 2.0 spec.

Danny Ayers seems to think that the absence of a namespace name on an attribute is equivalent to the attribute being in some 'empty' namespace along with other types that are in no namespace in that vocabulary. That is actually incorrect. The best documentation to put one straight on how to consider to elements and attributes in today's age of XML namespaces is the W3C XML Schema Primer. The XML Schema recommendation is the primary specification which describes how defining XML vocabularies in a namespace aware manner is supposed to work.

An attribute with an explicit namespace name (i.e. that has a prefix) is a global attribute which belongs to a particular vocabulary. There is only one declaration of an attribute with that name (namespace URI & local name pair) in the vocabulary. On the other hand, an attribute without a namespace name is scoped locally to the element it is declared on and is only defined in the context of that element. This means in a particular vocabulary multiple definitions of an attribute with a particular name can exist if it is un-namespaced since it is scoped locally to its owner element. 

Since Danny Ayer's is the co-author of the upcoming book entitled Beginning RSS and Atom Programming  I hope he does some more research on designing XML vocabularies before the book is published. A lot of the power of RSS is the ability authors have of defining their own vocabularies as RSS modules and I'd hate to see a new generation of RSS module designers inherit a bunch of bad habits because they read the wrong stuff in a book.


 

December 16, 2004
@ 02:05 PM

I recently started reading the Microsoft Monitor weblog written by Joe Wilcox of Jupiter Research. His blog joins the likes those of Miguel De Icaza and Jon Udell who I can be assured will write a fairly insightful commentary on Microsoft technology announcements. The big difference is that Jon and Miguel occassionally write about Microsoft technologies while Joe Wilcox does so all the time.

In a recent post entitled MSN's Rising Fortune  Joe Wilcox writes

It's strange in a way how fortunes can change, even in a company as large as Microsoft. For years, the MSN folks would be the brunt of jokes, for living on "the red"--as in money-losing--side of the Microsoft campus. And MSN lost money for more than seven straight years. But, under the leadership of Yusuf Mehdi, fiscal 2004 brought the division to profitability. And to prominence.

Consider that today Microsoft will hold a second teleconference on the MSN desktop search utility, this one for financial analysts. I can't recall the last time a MSN technology warranted a teleconference for Wall Street. Sure, search competition with Google is a reason. But today's call is another sign of MSN's growing importance to the broader Microsoft.

While the client division whacks away at Windows security problems, chucks features from Longhorn and readies the next-generation operating system's delivery for not 2005 but 2006, MSN chugs out a barrage of new consumer products. Just in the last few months, MSN has unleashed testing versions of a music store (now officially launched), overhauled IM client, blogging service, Web search service and now desktop search utility. More MSN goodies are coming, but I can't discuss them right now.

My only nitpick with his post is that he seems to have gotten the MSN organizational chart a little confused. Reading the list of Microsoft executives it states that Yusef Mehdi is the Corporate Vice President, MSN Information Services & Merchant Platform while David Cole is the Senior Vice President, MSN and Personal Services Group.

MSN can be broadly divided into information services (aka IS) which is all the content related stuff like the MSN.com webpage, MSN Music as well as MSN Search and communication services (CS) which are all the communication related apps such as Hotmail, MSN Spaces and MSN Messenger. Yusef's runs the IS side of the house while Blake Irving is the Corporate Vice President, MSN Communication Services and Member Platform Group. David Cole sits at the top of the MSN pile.

I just learned all this when I got here a couple of weeks ago. :)


 

Categories: MSN

Recently while reading Robert Scoble's blog I came across a link to the Wired article entitled The Long Tail. The article is focused on the entertainment media industry and how the Internet has fundamentally changed some aspects of it. The salient part of the article is the following excerpt

To get a sense of our true taste, unfiltered by the economics of scarcity, look at Rhapsody, a subscription-based streaming music service (owned by RealNetworks) that currently offers more than 735,000 tracks.

Chart Rhapsody's monthly statistics and you get a "power law" demand curve that looks much like any record store's, with huge appeal for the top tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks, which is about the amount of the fluid inventory (the albums carried that will eventually be sold) of the average real-world record store. Here, the Wal-Marts of the world go to zero - either they don't carry any more CDs, or the few potential local takers for such fringy fare never find it or never even enter the store.

The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsody's top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it's just a few people a month, somewhere in the country.

This is the Long Tail.

Given the recent launch of MSN Spaces I've been thinking about the lesson of the Long Tail in connection with blogging and blogging software. A lot of the hype and spilled ink about blogging has focused on the "high end" of the curve or the so-called A-list of blogging. The most recent being the Newsweek article entitled The Alpha Bloggers.

The most notable explanation of this phenomena has been Clay Shirky's Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality which begins with

A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world. This complaint follows a common pattern we've seen with MUDs, BBSes, and online communities like Echo and the WELL. A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on.

Prior to recent theoretical work on social networks, the usual explanations invoked individual behaviors: some members of the community had sold out, the spirit of the early days was being diluted by the newcomers, et cetera. We now know that these explanations are wrong, or at least beside the point. What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.

In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.

Although a lot of the meta-discussion about blogging either by the media or by other bloggers tends to focus on the so-called A-list there is the Long Tail to consider. Many research studies on blogging tend to indicate that a large number of weblogs have a readership of 10 people or less. To most bloggers, a weblog is a way to share their lives and experiences with their friends, family and colleagues not a way to become the next Robert Scoble or Doc Searles.  

When MSN Spaces was launched there was some negative feedback from certain popular bloggers most notably from Robert Scoble in his post MSN Spaces isn't the blogging service for me complaining that the service did not have enough features aimed at power bloggers. Mike Torres had a good explanation of our feelings on these sentiments in his post Is MSN Spaces for everyone?  where he wrote

So, who do I want to see using MSN Spaces?  I want my mom and dad to use Spaces.  I want my sister to have a space for her friends.  I want my in-laws to use Spaces to share holiday photos with all of us privately using Messenger-only access.  I want my old classmates to find me via my Space (this has already happened twice in two days.)  I want the (appx) 150 million MSN Messenger users to feel as if they have a place to express their feelings to the 10-15 people they care most about.  I want the (appx) 187 million Hotmail users to view Spaces as yet another way to keep in touch with loved ones for free.  I want college kids to post pictures of their classmates falling asleep in class from their mobile phones, and instantly have all their friends alerted in MSN Messenger - even if they are in another country.  I want people to use Spaces in ways we hadn't even thought of (note: not surprisingly, this is also already happening.)

That was our bar - real people, real experiences.  And we are ecstatic with the progress we have made.  People are excited about the level of integration into MSN Messenger with real-time notification and contact cards.  People are excited that we support RSS 2.0 and Trackbacks.  People are excited about the fact that MSN employees are finally blogging (we were before, we just didn't get linked to!) and engaging in an open discussion with our users. 

This is exactly how I feel. I've been interested in blogging and XML syndication because I've seen it as a way for people such as myself who are disconnected from friends and family to keep in touch. I want my mom to keep up to date with what's going on in my life by reading my blog. I want my friends from high school reading [some parts of] my blog. I want my kid sister blogging.

This means the prioritization of features that favor A-list and geek bloggers was lower than those that we felt and still feel make it easier for everyone to start blogging instead of just the alpha geeks and early adopters. As we continue to improve the service the questions we tend to ask ourselves are "Would this feature be useful to my mom, my spouse or my friends?" as opposed to "I wonder whether Robert Scoble or Doc Searles would like this feature?". I think we are on the right track and a majority of the feedback we've gotten as well as our sign up numbers seem to bear that out.

Remember the lesson of the long tail...don't just focus on the popular.


 

Categories: MSN

While taking a lunch break I decided to finish up implementing full support for FeedDemon newspapers in RSS Bandit. With my checkin a few minutes ago it is now possible to use the various custom newspaper styles for FeedDemon in RSS Bandit and vice versa. More importantly one can now view all items in a feed at once in the reading pane instead of just reading them one at a time.

Actually that is incorrect.

My goal was that one should be able to view all items in a feed in the newspaper view. However it seems I hit some performance issues using the System.Xml.Xsl.XslTransform class in the .NET Framework. Applying a newspaper view on 3 months of posts in a high traffic feed such as the InfoWorld feed took 10 to 15 seconds to display which was a bit too long especially since other tasks would be going on in the background at the same time which would make it take even longer. So the compromise I reached was that clicking on the a feed node in the tree view shows only the unread posts in the newspaper view. Below are links to screenshots of various newspaper views running in RSS Bandit

  1. Outlook 2003 (RSS Bandit style)
  2. PopBox Blue (FeedDemon style)
  3. Headlines (FeedDemon style)
  4. Sticky Notes (one of Radek's FeedDemon styles)

One thing I've noticed is that different feeds tend to benefit from different styles. For example, I'd prefer to read news sites like Wired or Slashdot with the Headlines style while I'd rather read traditional blogs with a style closer to Sticky Notes or PopBox Blue. This should be a fairly straightforward feature to add and the infrastructure code already exists. The question is whether any user besides me will utilize all this configurability. :)

There is also the feature that FeedDemon has where clicking on a ".fdxsl" file from within the application automatically downloads and installs the style. Although convenient this seems like a security issue. This would mean that the file would be written to “C:\Program Files\RssBandit\templates” which may require running as Administrator. If we keep this feature we might have to move the templates to a user specific folder. What do you RSS Bandit users think?


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

December 14, 2004
@ 05:48 AM

I noticed that the Many2Many weblog on social software has an entry entitled Ballmer Gets Blogging Religion which contains a review of MSN Spaces by Liz Lawley. She wrote

I set up an account there today (and was required to use my Microsoft Passport, which didn’t thrill me). My first impression was generally positive. The blogs support trackbacks, a notable omission in Blogger. They also have RSS feeds, which is good, but no Atom, which is disappointing. The built-in photo album is a nice touch, though it doesn’t hold a candle to Flickr. There are a range of themes to choose from, some of which are quite lovely. However, the site warns me that without Internet Explorer (for the PC, natch), I can’t take advantage of the full range of customization options. (To their credit, the site works well in Firefox on my Mac.)

The response time on the server is pretty sluggish this evening, which is a bit of a concern. And in general, I’m always nervous about having my blog posts hosted on a central service that I don’t control—I like having my text on a server that I can back up whenever I’d like. Not to mention that I feel pretty strongly about having my blog at my own domain name, free of ties to specific hosting services or tools.

All in all, I found Spaces to be a very credible and more fully-featured alternative to Blogger for users who want to set up a blog quickly and easily, and don’t want to spend money doing so (or learn a lot of technical skills to accomplish it). From accounts I’ve been reading lately, Blogger has been increasingly slow and unreliable—not ideal qualities at any time, but particularly not when a big-time competitor has just unleashed an alternative.

I was talking to Mike this afternoon and we were flattered by the feedback we got from Liz's review. There are a number of issues that Liz raises that I felt I should comment on.

The first point of clarification is about not supporting Atom feeds. The explanation for why MSN Spaces supports RSS 2.0 and not RSS 1.0 or Atom 0.3 is described in my post from several months ago entitled Mr. Safe's Guide to the RSS vs. Atom debate. Basically RSS 2.0 is the widest supported and most straightforward syndication format. Also there is no technical reason to support multiple syndication formats especially since it is potentially confusing to end users.

The built-in photo album may not be as powerful as an entire site focused on photo sharing such as Flickr or deviantART but I think it does a good job of allowing people to share photos in a simple, straightforward manner while allowing a richer expressivity than is currently provided by any of the major hosted blogging providers. The MSN Spaces team is always open to feedback on how to improve the service and I'm particularly curious as to what improvements or features others would like to see in the realm of photo sharing.

The performance issues Liz encountered on the days she tried the site have since been fixed. It was a combination of bad luck [hardware problems on some key servers] and unanticipated load in certain scenarios. Our GPM is fond of pointing out that no amount of stress testing can accurately potray actual usage of a service :)

Our team is paying attention to the various performance issues and we have tackled a number of the causes of sluggishness in the site. Any problems should be reported to through the feedback form on the site or can even be sent to me directly if necessary.  However I can't promise that I'll get back to every email immediately.

Thanks for the excellent feedback Liz.


 

Categories: MSN

It seems December is a good month for new releases from MSN. From Microsoft PressPass we learn Microsoft Introduces MSN Toolbar Suite Beta With Desktop Search , specifically

Microsoft Corp. today introduced a beta version of its new MSN® Toolbar Suite...The free suite of MSN search tools, available now in the United States at http://beta.toolbar.msn.com, is the latest development in a comprehensive MSN Search service that helps consumers more quickly find precisely what they are looking for and gives them more control over their search experience. The new MSN Toolbar Suite includes an updated version of the popular MSN Toolbar for Microsoft® Internet Explorer and new toolbars that are conveniently accessible through Windows and Microsoft Office Outlook®. The new toolbars include the MSN Deskbar for the Windows desktop, MSN Toolbar for Microsoft Office Outlook and MSN Toolbar for Microsoft Windows Explorer.

Being the MSN geek I am I hightailed it to http://beta.toolbar.msn.com to try out the the new Toolbar suite. So far the only part that has held my interest is the MSN Toolbar for Outlook which looks like a decent replacement for LookOut. The desktop search doesn't really interest me because I don't lose files on my hard drive and the Internet Explorer toolbar adds just a tad bit of clutter to IE (see below for screenshot). I use the Yahoo! toolbar all the time since it has my bookmarks and links to a lot of Yahoo! services I use (Maps, Movies, Mail, Finance, etc). I use the Google toolbar for search. The MSN toolbar doesn't really give me anything I want enough to lose the screen real estate although the quick links to MSN Spaces are nice. If you haven't installed any of the other toolbars then the MSN toolbar is as good as any of he others since the core functionality is the same but it doesn't have enough to get someone like me who's already using two IE add-in toolbars to add a third.

I also dislike the fact that it refused to install on my Windows 2003 machine.


 

Categories: MSN