www.live.com - The Gadget Challenge

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I’m loving www.live.com – I keep playing with it at home, adding and removing items and changing my layout to optimize it for me and my own personal experience. It’s not totally new, it reminds me of early development with DigitalDashbard and other similar concepts never mind portal products like our own SharePoint Services or Portal Server (I’ll not mention compeditive products ;) ). I certainly like it much more than the MSN customizable homepage although it is similar in many ways.

So I’m a fan - I’m attempting to convince my family it should be their new home page, slowly I’ll get there, I might just be a little keen ;)

So anyhow, I want to lay down a challenge – who will be the creator of the first NZ Gadgets? They look simple enough to develop (although I’ve not tried yet). I think it could be a great way to drive up the traffic to your site, especially when you are the first there!

To find out more about Gadgets and to browse some of the existing ones in the catalogue visit: https://microsoftgadgets.com/default.aspx

But I want you to build one so for that look at the developing docs at: https://microsoftgadgets.com/blogs/gadgetnews/articles/377.aspx

It will be a rough road, we have only started the journey and the docs are still a WIP, but I like the concept and you could win an X-Box 360! Let me know if you make one as well and I’ll see what I can do ;)

I’d challenge some of our big sites out there to think of something that relates to our users in NZ – content people want to see regularly on there homepage.

Some initial thoughts:

  • E-commence sites – how about a watch list for the user as a Gadget, or a gadget with the top items/promotions of the day?

  • News sites – how about the current news directly on the page?

  • Community sites – recently created articles, upcoming events?

  • …

It’s a new world for us, I’d love to see more NZ content on my personal homepage… Can you help me?

If you have an idea about a Gadget the relates to content you own,

let me know – I’m interested, I might event be able to help!