Love The Infinite Scrollbar

While in Whistler snowboarding for a few days, I missed the launch of the latest enhancements to Live.com.

While the site's still far from perfect (searching for "movies 98122" doesn't give me showtimes like Google or the old MSN Search, the MSN Shopping gadget that used to be on my page is now blank/broken, and other issues here and there), I've gotta say it's certainly improving every day.

And I've also gotta say.. I'm intrigued by the idea of launching many new features more and more often, even if they're not completely functional, available, or of the highest quality. It's certainly worked well for Myspace, which despite a large number of features not working much of the time, has been rather revolutionary among some demographics (for example, I don't think my little sister does email - if I want to send her a picture, I need to Myspace her). But alas, I'm rambling.. and oh could the first sentence of this paragraph be dangerous out of context. So back to live.com.


I like the clean look/feel of the search results page, and the integration across the other Windows Live services. And I love the infinite scrollbar - especially for image searches (though I still think that the "Zelda effect" is a better name ;).

I'm curious, is Microsoft the first to bring this effect to a web app? (If not, please do pardon my ignorance.)