While looking through the advanced options of Windows Live Search after my previous post I noticed this

Apparently you can customize how the search works, cool idea. Will have a play with this shortly.

Two of the features that made me like Windows Live Search a lot was the ability to navigate results without having to click on a page number to go to a next page and the ability to customise the depth of the results. It looks like these two features are now gone and I dont see why.

Eventhough I can setup Windows Live Search to show upto 50 search results on one page, I still hate that whole pages idea and LOVED the feature in Windows Live Search that overcame that problem.

Those two features were the reason I decided to use Windows Live Search more than I used Google, but now whats the difference between both?

They are both good enough for my search result purposes and I favoured Windows Live Search for the two features that are now gone.

Feedback posted to Live.com. It would be nice if the page can be customized to use either option I think.

I'm finally back up and running again on Vista with only a few more software to install. I've gone through a PC rebuild recently mainly because I needed a new Hard Disk.

It feels good to be back on Vista. I'm on build 5472 which makes me one build behind now. It's hard to catch up with the downloads! and I decided I'll wait for RC1 before my next upgrade.

Here are some of my thoughts.

- Installation time felt a little long still. From start to finish took a little over an hour.
- The non AERO UI in this build is much more appealing than the older greyish one, however, it feels like it doest match well with the black task bar.
- The first time load was quite slow but otherwise it loads at reasonable speed.
- The 'Hour Glass' is gone! Say hello to 'The Ring' (thats what I'll be calling it!)
- Everything seems to be running just fine so far. However, I wasnt happy I had to restart the system after a couple of software installs.

It's good to be back running AERO, after over a month away from VISTA and mainly using Win 2k3, it feels good to see some cool graphics

More thoughts later.

I just noticed that Lukas's blog is back up and running again.  His new blog is on http://blog.svoboda.co.nz and the RSS feed is here 

Welcome back online Lukas.

This is just for my own future reference. As I plan to have a play with writing Live.com gadgets some time soon.

See here for details

Here goes my first post from Windows Live Writer, and first impressions are this thing looks VERY cool. I've recently decided to try out as much as I can of the Windows Live family of services and products so expect to see more posts on Windows Live stuff very soon.

So far I've only blogged about Windows Live.Com, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Mail, and Windows Live Search, and here goes Windows Live Writer. More stuff soon on the categories I didn't cover closely and ones I havent covered yet

After being very annoyed by the Windows Live problem I reported in my previous post, I decided to go ahead and contact the Windows Live Support. And after exchanging about 6 emails with them my problem is FINALLY solved!

At first they suggested me resetting all my browser settings giving me all details on what to do ...etc and try again. Which I did and didnt fix anything. So I email back saying it didnt work and then they email back suggesting that my account might need resetting which they do, that still didnt work so I email again. They reply saying the have transfered the problem to the product support team and require blah blah of information which I give them and then they reply saying thanks ... and confirm they sent the problem to the product support team and FINALLY I get back an email saying that I should DELETE the 'Add Content' pane from my page and just use the 'Add Stuff' link at the top of the page. So I do this, and it WORKS, FINALLY!

Overall, I'm pleased with their attempts to help but I think it could have been a lot faster. So anyway my page is now rebuilt and Live.com is on my happy side again.

Oh and on a side note: Congrats to JD for winning this years blog of the year competition. Though it seems he can't find any PC's with internet connectivity at TechEd yet, see here for more! He hasn't announced his win on his blog!

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!!

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