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OK, so live.com (aka MSN Search, aka Microsoft Search, etc) is not a great search engine.  It is probably not as bad as its' reputation among Search Marketers.  I mean a good search engine specialist can kinda slap live.com around with some decent content, tags and a link you can almost make it do what ever you want, if you know how to game it.  For this live.com is bashed?

Oh and how about conversions?  Live.com only drives say 12% of search traffic so it is ignored by many but my experience has been the traffic from Live.com converts better then most other sources, certainly better then most traffic from Google.

Yet this is not about search, because honestly I use Google and Yahoo to search for stuff, what I love about Live.com is the way you can set up your Live.com page like many others with weather, news, etc.  Yet were it really shines is with RSS!  To me the lay out is just beautiful and simple to keep organized.  I love the "tabbed" effect you set up with multiple pages!  

Ironic really, it took MS forever to come up with tabbed browsing, yet they went with tabs in Live.com right away.   If you have never tried live.com for this take a look at this screen shot.

When it comes to tracking the blogs and new feeds that I stay in touch with I am absoultely in love with live.com.  When you have it open in the FireFox browser it almost feels like a natural extension of FireFox. 

If you hover on "more" a small pop up lets you read part of the story before you bother to click on it.   Here is a screen shot of that,

I have used a lot of different RSS Readers, I have tried Sharpe Reader which is a lot like a version of MS Outlook for RSS and it was really nice but if you use multiple computers then you have to set up your feeds for each one.  MyYahoo and  Google Reader are just not as simple, fast and clean to use.

Microsoft has done a LOT wrong in the online world and has taken far to long to do the things they have done right.  Yet using Live.com as an RSS reader is one of the things I do every day.  

So what do you think of Live.com, ever use it?  If you use something else what do you like better about your choice for RSS reading?

~ Jack Spirko

Technorati Tags: microsoft, google, msn, yahoo, live.com, msft, goog, yhoo,   rss, xml, feed reader, online news, office live, microsoft search, msn search

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