A day after Yahoo announced what the new front page of Yahoo.com will look like, and a couple of days after AOL redesigned its front page, Microsoft is doing pretty much the same thing, turning Live.com into a social networking hub of sorts.
It’s impossible to compare the three sites since neither the new Live nor Yahoo are live yet (the new Live.com homepage should be available later today at home.live.com), but the trend is obvious. The old, static (some would say boring) concept of a big web portal is dead: the social revolution is coming.
AOL is only dipping its toes into the new revolution, by adding the ability to check out various social sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, AIM, Bebo and Twitter, directly from the front page. Yahoo, although currently in test phase, will go so far as to enable third party developers to create applications for the Yahoo front page; furthermore, users will be able to fully customize the site to their liking.
The new Live.com will fall somewhere in between. It will integrate about 50 third party sites, such as Flickr, Twitter, Wordpress and LinkedIn, into the new homepage; users will be able to check out what’s happening on all of their profiles directly from Live.com. Furthermore, everyone who uses Live Messenger will automatically be connected with their friends through the site. One thing that still confuses me is naming; I don’t understand the difference between all the different iterations of live.com, home.live.com, windowslive.com and so forth. Regardless of the new changes, Microsoft needs to start making sense out of this mess before they completely confuse their users.
Regarding web portals in general, the paradigm has shifted. It is no longer important to have people click on various links on a portal, thus increasing your pageview count; all the major portals want to have their users’ undivided attention. They’re doing this by turning the portal into a social activity hub; a one stop shop for users who are dabbling with social networking but aren’t hardcore users and they don’t have time to open a dozen web sites each day. This, at least, is what AOL, Live.com and Yahoo are betting on.
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