Microsoft refreshed yet again last week its Start.com Web aggregator, to which the company is now referring as "My W3b."

Version three of Start.com was release in early June, following a version two release in April, and the initial Start.com bits in March.

The most recent batch of Start.com updates added tabbed search results, new style sheets, and the ability to close modules with just the "ESC" button.

MSN's aggregator appears to be a competitor to Web portals such as Google's personalized home page released in May of this year, and Yahoo's April 2005 release of My Web.

However, the MSN product managers don't like to refer to Start.com as a portal.

"It's not really a portal… [a portal is] like a list of links, it's like a page that you make with a bunch of HTML links, just a jumping off point, we want to take this content that you are interested in and have it as an application," Steve Rider, one of the two project managers, said in a video interview posted this week to MSDN's Channel 9 site.

"One thing that I think is interesting about start.com/3, the upcoming My AOL, and even My Google is that they focus hard on making it easy for casual users," said Greg Linden, an early developer of Amazon.com's personalization systems and founder of Findory.com

"The default page when you first go to the (Start.com) site is quite good, so you don't have to do any customization at all to find it useful," Linden continued. "And doing a small amount of customization is easy, as simple as dragging-and-dropping, helping novice users get started. This is important since competitors like My Yahoo and Bloglines require a fair amount of time and effort to set up and use."

"The most noticeable change comes in the way search results are displayed," said Gary Price on SearchEngineWatch.com. "Start.com results pages now allow you to quickly move between Web results, news results, and RSS results via tab links at the top of the page. RSS results come from feed directory that's powered by Moreover and also used at My MSN."

One of the Start.com developers, Steve Rider, said on his blog that "what we are building will appeal to every web user, minimal for Google fanatics, a deep news source for news junkies, etc."

Directions on Microsoft analyst Matt Rossoff said he "wouldn't put too much emphasis on Start.com at this point." He noted that "it's a pre-beta incubation project run by a handful of developers and may not have any bearing on where MSN is going in the long run."

However, Rossoff said, "the technology is somewhat interesting -- it takes advantage of RSS feeds to update the headlines, and seems to be built using (the up-and-coming programming model) Ajax -- but from an end-user's point of view, it doesn't seem all that different from My MSN or My Yahoo, both of which have been around for years."

"I do think that MSN will begin overhauling other parts of its sites and other services to give them a cleaner interface, perhaps built on Ajax as well. That's an interesting technical change, and is probably being driven by Google and the UI (user interface) design thoughts going on over there. But we probably won't see anything major on that front until this fall," said Rosofff.

Last December, MSN launched its Web log service, MSN Spaces, which publishes RSS feeds from blogs. In January, MyMSN began aggregating RSS feeds on personalized home pages, and in March, began quietly testing a Web-based service for RSS aggregation.

In May, MSN executives demonstrated planned MSN services that built syndication feeds into Web search, screen savers, and messaging alerts.