The New MSN
I opened my browser a second ago, and a butterfly busted out of the page. What are they feeding that thing? At any rate, I like the new MSN.com. I was a beta tester for MSN9, so I finally get a chance to talk about it a bit. MS really puts a lot behind MSN... I was surprised when three weeks ago, a limited edition gold-plated MSN 9 CD showed up on my doorstep (It's real gold, I had it checked). That's one hell of a beta tester thank you. And all I got for Office 11 was a lousy keychain.
Anyways, the new MSN home page is really well organized. I like the color-coded sections, and what not. The best part of all is MyMSN, which, I think might be using the ASP.NET 2.0 WebPart framework, or some derivative thereof. It's pretty frickin cool. I'm working on making my custom home page right now. Now someone just needs to come with an RSS feed provider so I can show the top 5 items from my favorite feeds there. I'd never have any other home page. It seems to be not letting me save my preferences right now, but hopefully they'll fix that. Maybe I need to enable cookies for this site, since I'm on IE6 SP2.... Nope, must be a technical glitch.
MSN Video is pretty cool too. The picture is bigger, and it's definitely much more visually appealing than it's predecessor. It even has an Enhanced client that installs locally, offering high-res playback at 750kps. I'm pretty sure it's a .NET app, because it's using the VS.NET generic installer screens, which is kindof surptising, but oh well.
All and all, it's a beautiful, functional upgrade. I'd highly recommend checking it out. You might make it your home page again.