Ok, so I've gone over to Live.com a few times, just to check it out because you inevitably get sucked into a conversation with somebody from Microsoft who uses it as an example of how Microsoft is doing Web 2.0.

So Live.com is supposed to be what – a showcase of Web 2.0 from Microsoft? If it is it's a really, really good example on what you don't want to be doing with the technology.

First the obvious. It's slow. Very slow. It's 1am HST on Saturday night and I went to the home page and it takes 30+ seconds to load. Ouch. Now I can go to Yahoo's home page – which BTW doesn't use any load AJAX yet supports Drag and Drop and extensive user customization – and that page snaps onto the screen faster than I can time manually. I get the same information nearly instantly even if I clear my browser cache plus a UI that actually makes sense.

Then there are script errors. One of the components on the page is not behaving due to a missing bracket.  This stuff is heavily using ATLAS XmlScript and it's scary to think of the good folks that have to debug this code.

Next – what am I really looking at? Live.com has to be the one of the most unintuitive interfaces I've ever run into on the Web. Seriously! When you arrive at the home page, there's no visual clue of where to start rearranging the UI. A bunch of data is displayed that has nothing to do with me. I see the weather from LA (I'm in Hawaii) and I see tons of empty panels. Great... now what? Oh yes, you go to the Gallery and pick things like Mail, Messenger, Search etc.

Ok, so I pick Mail. Nothing real obvious happens. I have to click on a button to subscript (+) and another panel changes and now I see 5 different mail items and a bunch of unrelated stuff. Clicking on one of the mail links and 4 clicks later I'm in my Hotmail Mailbox in a separate browser window. I'd call that a roundabout way to get to my mailbox…  After I'm done with THAT then I get the option to add a Mail panel to my screen layout. Talk about taking the long road. All of this is completely counter intuitive and not designed with any sort of usability in mind.

Then there's the Weather.com panel. Like I would EVER want to see my wheather in a panel that takes up half a browser window. But even better: There's no obvious way to change the location it checks for weather. I can conveniently switch from Fahrenheit to Celsius for the German that's left in me, but nope I can't seem to change my location. This might be somehow hooked to my PassPort profile, but there's no indication of that and I have yet to find a way or even a hint to actually change my profile that is actually used to preseed this data.

Meanwhile the page sits in the background and refreshes with content rotating in. Kind of annoying actually because it certainly isn't smooth and if you happen to be reading the panel that is refreshing – tough luck.

And so it goes on.

Sure this is yet another Microsoft showcase. Not really ready, but just showing work in progress. However, if I was in Microsoft's shoes I'd be embarrassed to put something like this online even as a beta. I don't know who this is supposed to be targeted at the moment? It certainly can't be end users. The anti-Microsoft crowd must be laughing their asses off...

And developers – other than those that want to take apart what goes under the covers – surely can recognize that this UI needs help and wouldn't waste their time.

So I don't really see what the focus of live.com site is. I suspect it's a way for Microsoft to have a forum to sell content space to content providers using the standard Gadget format to allow the content to be created. This supposedly will make it easier for developers to build content for Live.com.

But is this a realistic proposition? A proprietary platform interface (yes using Web standards, but still an API that's specific to Microsoft)? In addition, nobody is going to believe for a minute that this platform will be wide open – it'll be a for pay thing either for people subscribing to content or for content providers to be allowed space on live.com.

Either way this doesn't sound like an exciting business model for anybody but Microsoft.