Windows Live Personalized Experience

» see my.live.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

It began as an experiment called Start.com. Internal testing started on 14 December 2004, the first public version went up at start.com slash 1 on 5 February 2005, and over that year Microsoft iterated it in public through numbered URLs until start.com itself went live on 1 September. On 1 November 2005 the work was rebranded and relaunched at live.com as part of the announcement of Windows Live.

The product was a customizable homepage. You added RSS feeds, you dropped in gadgets for mail or weather or search or a slideshow, you made several tabs with different layouts and color schemes, and the page you got was yours. Firefox support arrived within a week, themes three weeks after that, and the whole thing came out of beta on 12 September 2006.

Its competition was iGoogle, and behind iGoogle a row of smaller ones like Netvibes and Pageflakes. The whole category rested on an assumption that now reads as a period detail: that people wanted a front page they had assembled themselves, and that they would set it as their browser homepage and look at it every morning.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

Microsoft kept moving it. On 17 April 2008 the page was relocated to my.live.com and given the name it is filed under here, Windows Live Personalized Experience, which nobody said out loud. The move mattered more than the name: live.com was a valuable address and Microsoft wanted it for something else.

That something else was Bing, which launched in June 2009 and immediately took live.com's traffic. By then the portal had been pushed down to a subdomain and stripped of the address people actually typed.

~ the cracks ~

In January 2010 Microsoft told users the service would be discontinued as of 15 March 2010 and pointed them at My MSN instead. That April, my.live.com began redirecting to My MSN and live.com began redirecting to Windows Live Home, the dashboard Microsoft had built in 2007 for people who wanted a front door to Hotmail and Messenger. Windows Live Home lasted until August 2013.

~ the homepage habit ~

The reason the start-page category died is that almost nobody chose their homepage. In the Ankara internet cafes of 2002 to 2005, every machine opened on whatever the owner had set, and nobody touched it, because the machine was not yours and you were there for an hour. At home it was whatever TTNet or the browser installer had put in the box. The people who built Live.com assumed an audience of configurers, and configurers were always a rounding error against everyone who typed the one word they wanted into the bar and pressed enter.

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