Microsoft has launched its new live.com and start.com websites seemingly both directly aimed at Googles recently launched personalised homepage google.com/ig.  I had a play with both today, and have been toying with the Google features for a while and it really looks like Microsoft have run a competition between two project teams to see which can deliver the goods the fastest, if that is the case the Start.com team definitely won in terms of slickness of design and functionality.

But are personalised homepages doing anything new? The concept of a personalised homepage has been around for a very long time, and yet shockingly no-one has really made it work.  In one of my early Dot Com roles before Neutralize (*\*) I even worked on the plans for a  hugely modular 'my homepage' using RSS feeds. However like many previous attempts to capture a users homepage visit with all these services you get the same batch of RSS based news feeds, weather and horoscopes.  To demonstrate how old hat this is, here's a link to the original personalised homepage from Altavista in May 1999 (yep that is 6.5 years ago) apart from the clean white and minimal backgrounds, and cool use of Javascript that are more popular these days for interactive functions, can you find the differences?

Guys Altavista were at it over 6  years ago, we're meant to be moving into WEB 2.0 territory now, please push the boundaries a bit further.