Solve a Puzzle and Get a Start.com Treat

This new interface is pretty cool (I think better than the previous two), but it seems to me that the key missing feature of all of your RSS interfaces is the fact that none of them remember which stories you've seen before and which are new. I use Bloglines because it does exactly this. Makes reading the news like reading email.

Taking this one step further, though, it seems that some feeds make more sense to handle as I have described while others make more sense to handle in your fashion. For example, a weather feed might as well just always show the latest weather, and likewise with the various "____-a-day" feed (word-a-day, comic-a-day, etc.).

It took only 15 seconds of trying to answer the question(s) before deciding not to waste any more time. It's great to see things like this fail quickly. In search of stupidity continues...

It looks very promising, and the bits that I could figure out seemed to work nicely. Unfortunately that wasn't very much - the Ajax overload is very distracting. Remember the marquee tag..?

for those who simply can't figure it out:
http://www.start.com/myw3b


I like how it's showing the diversity of search techniques too - most people don't understand 90% of the true functionality of the search.

Over on MSN Search's WebLog you'll read news that Microsoft has released (IE only) a new version of their Start.com customizable home page....

You've probably heard of MyYahoo. I've been using it your a couple years now for both email and RSS aggregation (though lately it seems to be running unusually crappily. Might be time to switch to BlogLines). And I'm sure...

Yeah....that page works great. What a waste of time. Here's the error after hitting the button "did i get it"



Server Error in '/' Application.
The resource cannot be found.
Description: HTTP 404. The resource you are looking for (or one of its dependencies) could have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. Please review the following URL and make sure that it is spelled correctly.

Requested Url: /3/

The puzzle is annoying. If you want to showcase features, it would be far better for you to create an optional tour of screendumps.

The acid test of your aggregator shouldn't be 'is this better than MyYahoo', but 'is this better than Bloglines, MyYahoo and whatever Google will come up with'.

You guys suck. Why do you need to load your new features with all this marketing BS?

start.com is promising, I'm not going to use MSN search because it's crap. Deal with it and let me work the way I want to.

Isn't it like asking "hey Bill Gates! whats your name"

WTF is this puzzle crap?

adding feeds always gives me errors, it's a shame

Not much milk of human kindness on the Net, eh?

The test questions may be a bit of a pain, but your efforts deserve a little more appreciation than most of your comment writers.

Keep plugging away!

Hey Brady you should ask scoble to add the MSN Search Weblog to his blogroll.

General

http://www.jnd.org/dn.pubs.html - a collection of essays on various topics from design...