Yes, you can definitely see where they put to use the start.com work, but you're right Dan, start.com has worked in firefox for awhile, so its weird why live.com wouldn't. And, while start.com has been around for awhile, I still dont see why theres all this fanfare around live.com? When google published their personalized home page, there was little buzz, except for on some blogs, and nobody was saying that it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

And I agree that the preference between start.com or google is just a preference, at this point you get the same thing regardless of which one you use, I'm a google man, personally :-)

Joshua, portals existed before Googles personalized portal, but nobody used dhtml as well as they have. the page also loads quickly and is very clean and simple to use. When google does stuff like this its never a big media hoopla on their part, they just kind of release it and say "here it is, do what you will." Whereas with Microsoft, they have a whole launch event and formal press and things like that, basically clamoring for attention, it takes the luster off of something if people have to ask for attention, rather than people just discovering it.