Microsoft opened up start.com/3 over the weekend and it isn’t quite what I was hoping for. Granted, it’s pretty cool. The user interface has lots of DHTML goodness, and is highly configurable, but this is in the realm of Google’s Portal or My Yahoo!. Basically, start.com/3 is a RSS-centric portal. To all those who are calling it an aggregator, it’s not quite there yet. Take a look at Bloglines, Rojo, or Newsgator Online for examples of an aggregator. Key points are: Unified Viewing of Feeds, Tracking of Read/Unread items, and preferably Nested Folders for organizing feeds.
I’m betting that Microsoft still has an aggregator up their sleeves, and hopefully it’ll have the same great design elements that the latest start.com incubator has shown off. We’ll just have to keep waiting…
One Man Shouting 