Windows Live is here

A few days ago, Microsoft announced a new Internet-based software service called Windows Live. The idea is to bring together all sorts of different feeds and gadgets together in one place in your web browser. For example, you can display the weather for your town or city, alongside the news headlines from your favourite news feed alongside your Hotmail inbox. You can also use it to subscribe to your favourite feeds and have them all available to you from a single web page. What is more, you can do everything by dragging and dropping. Have a look for yourself at www.live.com.

For the technical minded people out there, it uses AJAX, short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. This provides a much more interactive experience to web applications and is something that I think will really take off over the next few months. Infact, it's a technology we're thinking of using for our Softalk Organizer product.

As well as providing a set of RSS feeds, Microsoft also provide a set of gadgets, which are more than just lists of the latest articles from an RSS feed. You can think of gadgets as mini-applications that will sit in your dash board, providing you with richer content, for example, Microsoft provide a weather gadget that shows a set of images portraying a 5 day weather forecast for your local area. For more information, see Michael Arrington's Techcrunch blog.

A calendar gadget would be a good addition. What gadgets do you think would be a welcome addition to Windows Live?