Sweeping Changes At Live.com: It's A Social Network!
Microsoft's Live.com portal will change significantly this evening. No longer will it be a simple search engine with a few other services bolted on. It's now a social network, too, pulling in activity information and content from around the web.
Context & Ripple Effects
Live.com began as a customizable search destination, with pages, gadgets and integrated Windows Live Search defining its earlier role. A 2007 search refresh kept that orientation centered on retrieval.
Microsoft's March 2008 effort to work with social networks around user data supplied the missing connective tissue for a portal organized around activity and content from elsewhere. The redesign turns those partnerships from an adjacent initiative into part of Live.com's core experience.
First-order effects
- Live.com users receive a homepage organized around web activity and shared content rather than a search box with attached services.
- Microsoft must operate Live.com as an aggregation layer, making the availability and presentation of outside activity central to the portal's value.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft's social-network partners gain another distribution surface for their users' activity, while Microsoft gains a reason to deepen the data connections announced in March.
- Live.com's product competition shifts from improving search features alone to keeping a socially updated destination useful enough for repeat visits.
Third-order effects
- If Microsoft can sustain access to outside activity, portal design moves toward federated social feeds rather than standalone search destinations, increasing the strategic value of interoperable user-data partnerships.
The trend: Consumer web portals are evolving from destination search pages into aggregation layers that combine search, services and social activity.