Some morning snippets:

Looks like AOL Instant Messenger is allowing equal signs back in profiles. <sarcasm> What a great effort by AOL in only taking a month or so to fix a trivial bug </sarcasm>

. . .

Windows has a new search engine portal out at Live.com; I am really loving some parts of it and really hating most of it.

Here is a list of pros:

• It works in both IE and FF! Yay! Cross-browser compliance rocks!
• It's using heavy Ajax (but this is also a con, see below)
• It's pretty simple-looking for a MS site
• I LOVE the no-pagination for search results - I hate pagination with a PASSION. What's awesome is as you scroll through the results, your URL location will automatically update so it's JUST like a hardlink - I've been wishing GMaps would do this for the longest time (I hate right clicking the "Link to this page" option). It just makes no sense why sites would add another UI element when people already understand the concept of the browser's URL field. Great JOB here! (Also, speaking of no-pagination, there's a cool app called Flickr Leech which creates one-page of all the interesting images from one day. I love it)
• Built-in feeds = nice, but it doesn't seem powerful enough to make me want to replace Bloglines

A list of cons:

• I'm going to mark this up as a "this is an early release" issue, but the UI is a horrible mess. It literally took me (the webpage maker) a few minutes to figure out what Windows Live actually is.
  • It's not entirely clear that this site is a search/portal - the first mistake was using the Microsoft Windows flag logo ... I thought this site had something to do with Windows. It took me a while to dissociate the site from Windows - why even bother branding it to Windows? It's just confusing.
  • 
    Huh? Are you sure this is what you want visitors to read this first?
    
    It certainly doesn't help that the HUGE text that draws your eyes says: "Make live.com yours: We've picked some stuff to get you started, uncheck anything you don't want." How awesomely vague with the great abundance of pronouns as well as words that mean nothing ("anything"). They might as well have said: "Gooboodeejar: Fah la la bork bork." At least I woudl have gotten a laugh out of that. How about something more relevant like: "Personalize your live.com homepage: We've got some options to help manage your web browsing - customize your options on the right". Or something. It's too early for me to think clearly about wordsmithing.
  • 
    The return of the pseudo-Clippy
    
    I thought Microsoft had learned its lesson from Clippy, but Live seems to want to popup random messages informing me that certain input boxes can be used... wow, really? If you're going to restyle common UI elements like input boxes, you shouldn't have to put a popup box next to it; either make the styling clear that it's an input box, or don't style it.
  • 
    So... can I actually click these checkboxes, or are they like a Web 2.0 way of telling me what features this site offers?
    
    This is related - now I know having Apple UI envy is clearly a Web 2.0 obsession, and I think it's a relatively good one ... but why are people SO obsessed with replacing common input elements? Checkboxes, select menus, input forms... clearly Live.com wants to completely reinvent the <INPUT> forms. How about worry about form first? The site is confusing without me really knowing if those checkboxes are pretty graphical things or actually functional.
  • The click targets are really confusing. Pop-quiz: identify what is clickable in this screenshot:
    Apparently the icons themselves are clickable, while the text underneath it is not. And clicking "more" launches a new window of that items, except when there's a "Windows Live" add button, which if you click loads some window on the top of the page ... (did I lose you? Yeah, I got pretty lost, too). I mean, I understand that hyperlinks are so Web 1.0, but it'd be nice if I didn't have to hover over ever bit of text with my mouse to see if it's a link.

Overall, this has probably been the most impressive web-offering from MS. Now let's see how long before they start trying to cross-promote all their other stuff on there ...