Had a brief play with Windows Live this morning. I’d previously signed up and had a look sometime last year, and it seems to have changed little. In particular, the lengthy non-human-readable URLs are unappealing, and the way it slowly redirects through several different authentication URLs on some links is ridiculous. Makes LiveJournal look like a beacon of simplicity and elegance in comparison!

http://cid-edacb335ffe08517.profile.live.com/

I added some external services (LiveJournal, Facebook, last.fm), and two of them required multiple attempts before succeeding. It all seemed a bit flaky.

The personal profiles have educational information as an option, with a list of universities from around the world, but only appears to let one select a single university. Obviously nobody at Microsoft has multiple degrees.

And then I gave up because it got into a loop of redirections between various authentication pages, before coming up with an internal error. Repeatedly.

Maybe it all works better in IE.