I don't know how long this has been the case but it's annoying me alot, I went through a PC rebuild last week and after I was back up and running I logged on to my 'customized' Windows Live page and hmm... It's no longer there. All my custom settings have been lost and it went back to the default look you get when you first set it up. I was very annoyed by this but I thought maybe the settings where stored in cookies or something on my local machine that got deleted from my rebuild. So I go to work the next day and load up my page there again and hmm... I see the old settings but then I think maybe this is a cached page. So I refresh it and :-( I lose everything again. The next thing I think of, it's ok, I can rebuild my settings on live.com but I can't and here's why.

As you can see above, the add content pane never gets populated with the content I can add and remaings "loading" forever. Very annoying...

Right so it seems the hot topic of today is TradeMe's launch of their Job listing service... This actually had me start thinking about the following. What happened to innovation? It seems to me that a lot of companies in NZ and world wide see others doing something and then going, that looks like a cool thing to do we should do that too... and then they do and we end up with multiple offerings of very very similar services, so whats the point there? Maybe there's something I don't get, but unless there is a significant difference I just dont see the point.

Here are some examples in different areas.

Maps: Wises, Zoomin and now Yellow Pages too
Auctions: Trademe,Zillion and 2TradeIt
Jobs: Seek, Job Stuff and now TradeMe

And some global Examples

Google, Windows Live Search
iPod, Zune...etc

I'm not denying that new market entrants can help bring innovations on existing products/services but I really think that companies should invest in new ideas and new offerings rather than go outside what they do best to offer services already offered by others.

But who knows, maybe I got it all wrong!!

Remember to Vote For Me!

I've been playing with the Office 2007 Beta 2 RSS reader for a while now and it hasn't met my expectations :(. It has a long way to go to become a good RSS reader IMHO. Here are some of the things that I dont like.

- I can't see any comments related to a post.
- Can't go to the root node of the folder and click 'Mark All as Read' and have all posts marked as read. Well the option seems to be there but it doesnt seem to work on the root node but it does on each blog I'm subscribed to and this is really annoying (maybe thats actually a bug).
- And hmm... thats all I can think of now.

Currently downloading Vista v 5472 will be posting experiences soon.

It's that time of the year again. The NZ.NET blog competition is back!

Vote For Me

I just noticed that Windows Live Messenger and a few other Windows Live products have now gone out of beta. Google are you listening! One thing that looks interesting among those is Windows Live Domains. It seems that this will make possible one of my early requested features of being able to access other email accounts than Hotmail though windows Live.

Off first glance it looks like the offering is very similar to google's which Rod has been trying out. But with less storage space. Will be interesting to see how these two evolve in the future. The main difference at present is that Google's offering is beta while Windows Live's isn't.

Ok so it's been over two weeks since I've posted saying that I will give Windows Live Search a try. Well here are some of my thoughts. In my previous post I mentioned two of the annoying things I found with Windows Live and posted an update on how to resolve one of them. Well it looks like the second one (the position of the search box on the page+ the tab order) has been solved! I was soo annoyed by this so I even ended up posting feedback comments to Windows Live about it! And guess what (they seemed to listen - yeah right!)

Well, not long after I posted the feedback I noticed that when you are not signed in to Windows Live, the page has been tidied up a bit with the search box in the middle of the page and the tab order selecting the search box by default and all the other non necessary stuff not shown (NICE) this means that I can go and use Windows Live Search just as a search tool without a distraction by all the other stuff just like I would use google. I really like that change.

Search Performance: 

As for the search performance, well it seems to do a very decent job but there are 2 things that annoyed me. Search results for the stuff I looked for in the past two weeks were almost always relevant. I only went to Google once to find something I couldnt find directly by using WLS. However, there was one thing that spoilt my experiment (my Google addition!) on 3 or 4 occassions even when having WLS as my default page. When I am browsing somewhere else and needing to look for something I immediately find myself searching Google! Otherwise I was very please with Windows Live Search. The annoying thing I found was the way WLS displays the results- but there is a way around it. The way WLS displays results without letting you click to go to a next page is a very great idea but was annoying in the following case. If you use the cursor to move the scroll bar and reach the bottom if it, it automatically jumps back to the top of the middle of the page to continue displaying the results. This makes you lose the position of the cursor above the scroll bar which I found a bit annoying. The way around this is to just use the down arrow key on the keyboard (which of course is more efficient anyway)

So overall WLS is looking good. I've played with News,Images and the general search during those two weeks.

This just caught my attention, was looking at my blog this afternoon and I spotted the following:

I couldnt help but clicking the add to see where it will take me. I ended up on MS Germany's Visual Studio / Visual Web developer's page. I wonder why MS Germany are using Adwords!!

So have you been using Vista for a while now and are sick of all those security dialog warnings from UAC. Well you can change that and disable warnings on things you know you executed hence reducing the habbit of auto-clicking continue. Mauricio posts on  how to do this. Nice...

I've decided to give Windows Live Search a good try and see if it will make a good subsitute to Google for me. There are already 2 things I dong like about the Windows Live Search interface, but I will give it a fair chance to just test how well it performs in returning useful results for what I'm looking for. The way I'll judge this is by seeing if I can find everything I am looking for without having to go look in google. This is not a formal experiment but just an attempt for me to convince myself whether or Windows Live Search is worthed.

The things I dont like about the interface are the fact that the search box is at the top of the screen. Why do I have to move the mouse all the way to the top of the screen to type a search query (and yes I know you can tab into fields and not have to move the mouse but to get to the search box thats another 4 tab clicks) Again I think the first tab order should be the box. The other thing is the number of search results that show on the page, in google I can see more results on each page and the WLS page displays sub results of listings from the same site (the indented ones) thats a waste of space IMO it would make a lot more sense to me to see top level listings as this will reduce the ammount of scrolling one has to do.

Anyway, I will ignore all those annoyances and see if I can really rely on the results returned by WLS for the next 2 weeks without having to go to Google.

Update: I just noticed that you can control the depth of the search for an entry using this thing: available at the top right corner

the further left you pointed the more results displayed with less descriptive detail. That kindof solves one of the two things I reported not liking.