Live goes Live - Live.com and Live.com Gadgets

After watching Bill Gates' keynote at yesterday's CES, I was intrigued by Windows Live, and spent some time this morning exploring all of the available betas on the Windows Live Ideas page.

The blanket goal of Live is to empower people by making everything in their online lives "work simply and effortlessly together." The concepts of Web 2.0 (or buzzwords, as you wish) undoubtedly apply!

I'll start with my favorite: Live.com is now my browser homepage. I love it. It provides a tremendously configurable portal view. It's clean and fast and as easily customizable as anything I've seen. You can add any RSS content to the page, so I've added some local news, as well as some of my favorite RSS feeds that I tend to "ping" during the day.

It looks like Javascript is the way to build these things called "Gadgets," which can be used to further customize your Live.com page. That means that to build Gadgets, I may need to become one with Atlas. 

If you've built a Live.com Gadget, I'd be interested in hearing your experiences. There are zillions already!