Winner for Today’s ‘Most Underwhelming Reveal’ Award Is Live.com

I was under impressed with Microsoft's Live.com Live Search page when it first came out, and have largely ignored it since. When a few of the people I follow on Twitter gave the new feature release today bad one line Twitter reviews, I felt compelled to revisit it and see what they were bothered about.

Looking over the "big news" from Microsoft I see… hot spots and images? Is that it? Wait, the hot spots also have fly overs. So, we get pictures that change, annoying fly over/pop up blocks when we mouse of a page, and clickable image areas.

Was that really worthy of an announcement? I'm not one to rag on changing the look and feel of a site. It can work, just look at the latest FaceBook profile upgrade. It's much cleaner (a little too clean, for me - I live the noise). In this case it just seems so underwhelming.

I must say I'm not really a fan of the pop ups, fly overs and pop outs on web pages. If I go to a site that has Snap installed, I never return. I can't stand that - it completely ruin any flow of reading for me to have to deal with a pop up or slide out of any form. On an image I suppose it isn't that bad, but I still find it annoying.

I can see why everyone was so under impressed with this "improvement", and I can see why bloggers like Marshall K. of Read, Write, Web and others chose to give this the one line or less review it deserved on Twitter. If you were looking for something thrilling to check out today, the Live.com upgrade isn't it.