Michael Schwartz reports that certain aspects of Microsoft's flagship web development, www.live.com, are pretty slow. He speculates that is is their new Atlas framework which is causing this, but Scott Guthrie jumps in on the comments of the post to correct him - Scott says that the XML parsing of RSS feeds is the slow part of live.com This reinforces Michael's message regarding the strange decision by MS to use an XML scripting language (I'm not familiar with this) rather than JSON...
Live.com's image search is excellent, if slightly clunky. Their search is good but not responsive enough - and it removes my middle click functionality in Firefox. And the portal / live homepage thing, it's just like all of the other ajax portal startups - a novelty. Just like the gadgets on the Vista sidebar strangely enough!