collection of Internet sites
This article is about the web site and apps. For the Internet serve supplier, see MSN Dial-up. For other uses, see MSN ( disambiguation ) MSN ( meaning Microsoft Network ) is a web portal vein and relate collection of Internet services and apps for Windows and fluid devices, provided by Microsoft and launched on August 24, 1995, the same dismissal date as Windows 95. [ 2 ] The Microsoft Network was initially a subscription-based dial-up on-line serve that later became an Internet service supplier named MSN Dial-up. At the same time, the party launched a newfangled web portal named Microsoft Internet Start and set it as the first default home page of Internet Explorer, its web browser. In 1998, Microsoft renamed and moved this vane portal site to the knowledge domain name www.msn.com, where it has remained. [ 3 ]

In addition to its original MSN Dial-up service, Microsoft has used the ‘MSN ‘ stigmatize name for a broad kind of products and services over the years, notably Hotmail ( late Outlook.com ), Messenger ( which was once synonymous with ‘MSN ‘ in Internet gull and has now been replaced by Skype ), and its web research engine, which is now Bing, and several other rebranded and discontinued services. The current web site and suite of apps offered by MSN was first introduced by Microsoft in 2014 as share of a complete redesign and relaunch. [ 4 ] MSN is based in the United States and offers international versions of its portal for dozens of countries around the world. [ 5 ]

history [edit ]

Microsoft Internet Start [edit ]

MSN.com on its initial plunge day, August 24, 1995 MSN.com in October 1996, with the logo used from 1995 to 1998 From 1995 to 1998, the MSN.com domain was used by Microsoft primarily to promote MSN as an on-line service and Internet service provider. At the time, MSN.com besides offered a custom-made startle page and an Internet tutorial, but Microsoft ‘s major world wide web portal was known as “ Microsoft Internet Start ”, and was located at home.microsoft.com. Internet Start served as the default option home page for Internet Explorer and offered basic information such as news program, weather, sports, stocks, entertainment reports, links to other websites on the Internet, articles by Microsoft staff members, and software updates for Windows. Microsoft ‘s original news web site, hypertext transfer protocol : //msnbc.com ( immediately NBCNews.com ), which launched in 1996, was besides tied closely to the Internet Start portal .
In 1998, the largely underutilized ‘MSN.com ‘ knowledge domain name was combined with Microsoft Internet Start and reinvented as both a world wide web portal vein and as the brand for a class of sites produced inside Microsoft ‘s synergistic Media Group. The new web site put MSN in direct contest with sites such as yahoo !, Excite, and Go Network. Because the fresh format opened up MSN ‘s subject to the global for release, the Internet service provider and subscription avail were renamed to MSN Internet Access at that clock time. ( That service finally became known as MSN Dial-up. ) [ 3 ] The relaunched MSN.com contained a whole syndicate of sites, including original contented, channels that were carried over from ‘web shows ‘ that were share of Microsoft ‘s MSN 2.0 experiment with its Internet service provider in 1996–97, and new features that were quickly added. MSN.com became the successor to the default Internet Explorer start foliate, as all of the previous ‘Microsoft Internet Start ‘ web site was merged with MSN.com. [ 3 ] Some of the original websites that Microsoft launched during that era remain active in some form today. Microsoft Investor, a commercial enterprise news and investments service that was once produced in junction with CNBC, is now MSN Money ; [ 6 ] [ 7 ] [ 8 ] CarPoint, an car comparison and shop service, is now MSN Autos ; and the Internet Gaming Zone, a web site volunteer on-line fooling games, is now MSN Games. other websites since divested by Microsoft include the travel web site Expedia, the on-line magazine Slate, and the local event and city search web site Sidewalk.com. In the belated 1990s, Microsoft collaborated with many other service providers, angstrom well as other Microsoft departments, to expand the rate of MSN ‘s services. Some examples include MSN adCenter, MSN Shopping ( affiliated with eBay, PriceGrabber and Shopping.com ), and the Encarta encyclopedia with assorted levels of access to information. Since then, MSN.com has remained a popular address, launching many new services and subject sites. MSN ‘s Hotmail and Messenger services were promoted from the MSN.com portal, which provided a cardinal plaza for all of MSN ‘s content. MSN Search ( now Bing ), a dedicated search engine, launched in 1999. The individual sign-in service for Microsoft ‘s on-line services, Microsoft Passport ( immediately Microsoft report ), besides launched across all MSN services in 1999. The MSN.com portal site and relate group of services under the ‘MSN ‘ umbrella remained largely the lapp in the early 2000s. The sports section of the MSN portal vein was ESPN.com from 2001 to 2004, and FoxSports.com from 2004 to 2014. [ 9 ] [ 10 ] MSN had an exclusive partnership with MSNBC.com for news contentedness from 1996 until 2012, when Microsoft sold its remaining stake in msnbc.com to NBCUniversal and the web site was renamed NBCNews.com. Since then, MSN has launched ‘MSN News ‘, an in-house newsworthiness operation. [ 11 ] As of May 2005, MSN.com was the moment most travel to portal websites in the United States with a plowshare of 23.2 percentage, behind yokel ! which held a majority. [ 12 ] MSN released a preview of an update home page and logo on November 3, 2009. [ 13 ] It was primitively expected to be widely available to over 100 million U.S. customers by early 2010. [ 14 ] [ 15 ] MSN rolled out the newer logo, together with a redesign of the overall web site, on December 25, 2009. [ 16 ] [ 17 ] In 2012, MSN announced on its web log that it would be unveiling a newfangled version of the MSN.com home page on October 26, entirely for Windows 8, saying that the modern version would be “ clean, bare, and built for touch ”. [ 18 ] Microsoft said it would be more app-like due to the accelerate of Internet Explorer 10. More new features included ‘Flip Ahead ‘, which allowed users to swipe from one article to the adjacent. MSN for Windows 8 besides had new deals with the AP and Reuters. [ 19 ]

Rebranding of services [edit ]

many of MSN ‘s services were reorganized in 2005 and 2006 under a new brand name that Microsoft championed at the time, Windows Live. This move was separate of Microsoft ‘s strategy to improve its on-line offerings using the Windows brand appoint. The party besides overhauled its on-line software and services due to increasing competition from rivals such as yahoo ! and Google. The fresh name was introduced one serve at a time. The group of Windows Live services used Web 2.0 technology to offer features and functionality through a network browser that were traditionally only available through dedicated software programs. Some of the MSN services affected by the rebranding included MSN Hotmail, which became Windows Live Hotmail ( now Outlook.com ) ; MSN Messenger, which became Windows Live Messenger ( now integrated into Skype ) ; MSN Search, which became Live Search ( now known as Bing ) ; MSN Virtual Earth, which became Live Search Maps ( now Bing Maps ) ; MSN Spaces, which became Windows Live Spaces ; MSN Alerts, which became Windows Live Alerts ; and MSN Groups, which became Windows Live Groups. Some other services, such as MSN Direct, remained a function of the MSN family without transitioning to Windows Live. Following the launch of Windows Live, the MSN post took on a different focus. MSN became chiefly an on-line content supplier of news, entertainment, and common pastime topics through its web portal site, MSN.com, while Windows Live provided most of Microsoft ‘s on-line software and services. In 2012, Microsoft began to phase out the Windows Live stigmatize, referring to each service individually by its individual mark name without any ‘Windows ‘ prefix or association. [ 20 ]

subsequent redesign [edit ]

Microsoft launched a completely rewrite and redesigned MSN web site, making practice of the party ‘s modern design speech, on September 30, 2014. [ 4 ] The new MSN portal features a raw version of the logo that follows a style similar to other current Microsoft products. The web site no longer offers original content, rather of employing editors to repurpose existing content from partners at popular and trust organizations. much of the existing contented on MSN was eliminated as the web site was simplified into a new home page and categories, some of which have corresponding apps : [ 21 ]

  • News: The latest news headlines and articles from a variety of hand-picked sources. Synced with the News app.
  • Weather: Current weather conditions, forecasts, maps, news, and traffic. Synced with the Weather app.
  • Entertainment: TV, movies, music, and celebrity news, as well as theater showtimes, tickets, and TV listings. Based on the former Bing Entertainment service. Also includes the MSN Games website for online casual games.
  • Sports: Up-to-the-minute scores, standings, and headlines from leagues worldwide. Synced with the Sports app.
  • Money: Stock market tickers and watchlists, personal finance, real estate, investments, currency converter, and more. Synced with the Money app.
  • Lifestyle: Headlines, features, and other content related to style, home & garden, family, smart living, relationships, and horoscopes.
  • Health & Fitness: Tools and information about weight loss, strength, exercise, nutrition, medicine, and more.
  • Food & Drink: Recipes, cooking tips, news from chefs, cocktails, and shopping lists.
  • Travel: Destinations, trip ideas, hotel search, flight search, flight status, and arrivals and departures. Previously based on Farecast.
  • Autos: Research and buying advice, auto-related news, information for enthusiasts, and coverage of auto shows worldwide.[22]
  • Video: Trending and viral videos, comedy and pop culture, and videos from other MSN categories. Integrates with video search from Bing Videos.

The top of the home plate page provides access to Microsoft services Bing, Outlook.com, Skype, Office Online, OneNote, OneDrive, Bing Maps, and Groove Music, adenine well as popular social media services Facebook and Twitter. [ 4 ] Signing into MSN with a Microsoft score allows for personalized content to appear and to be synchronized across devices on the web site and in the equate apps. The redesign of the web site led to the settlement of MSN ‘s longtime personalized home page service ‘My MSN ‘, which was made up of customize RSS feeds, as the new web site no longer supports user-specified RSS contented. however, it added some customizability, allowing each category on the home page to be reordered or hidden. With the 2014 relaunch, MSN now supports responsive design and eliminates the necessitate for a offprint mobile web site. The redesign of MSN proved incontrovertible and helped increase traffic with an extra 10 million day by day visitors after two months. [ 23 ]

Apps [edit ]

The MSN web-based apps provides users information from sources that publish to MSN. Microsoft launched these apps along with the 2014 redesign of the MSN network portal vein, rebranding many of the Bing apps that in the first place shipped with Windows and Windows Phone. News, Weather, Sports, Money, and Travel first shipped with Windows 8, while Health & Fitness and Food & Drink first appeared in Windows 8.1. [ 24 ] [ 25 ] In December 2014, the apps became available across all the other major mobile device platforms as well : io, Android, and Fire OS. [ 26 ] [ 27 ] [ 28 ] [ 29 ] [ 30 ] The apps permit users a reasonable sum of freedom to decide which sources provide information. Each app has its own color code that is used on the exist tile and internally. primitively, each app brought a mix experience with the MSN web site and synchronized preferences across devices ; for case, setting a tilt of stocks to watch on MSN.com would show the lapp datum on the MSN Money app on all devices where the exploiter was signed in with a Microsoft bill. The synchronism was dropped when the apps were rebuilt for Windows 10.

There are presently four apps in the suite : News, Weather, Sports, and Money. [ 31 ] In July 2015, Microsoft announced the discontinuance of the Food & Drink, Health & Fitness, and Travel apps on all platforms, and that they will not be bundled with Windows 10 ; those three apps are no long offered. [ 32 ] After Microsoft ‘s skill of Nokia ‘s mobile phone division, Microsoft besides started bundling MSN services with its Nokia-branded have phones, though the merely confirm model was the Nokia 215. [ 33 ] [ 34 ] [ 35 ] In addition to these apps, Microsoft developed a separate set of mobile apps specifically for MSN China .

News [edit ]

Microsoft News ( previously named MSN News and Bing News ) is a news collector and service that features news headlines and articles chosen by editors. The app includes sections for top stories, U.S., worldly concern, money, engineering, entertainment, impression, sports, and crime, along with early assorted stories. It allows users to set their own personalized favorite topics and sources, get notifications of breaking newsworthiness through alerts, trickle preferred newsworthiness sources, and change baptismal font sizes to make articles easier to read. [ 36 ] in the first place, News included an RSS feed, but that capability was removed ; Microsoft presently only allows users to subscribe to specified news sources, thereby curating news. [ 37 ] News uses the chaseable live tile feature introduced in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. If a exploiter clicks on the News Start menu tile when a particular report is shown, the exploiter will see a link to that narrative at the top of the app when it launches. [ 38 ]

weather [edit ]

MSN Weather ( originally named Bing Weather ) shows upwind from a exploiter ‘s current placement or any other placement cosmopolitan, and it allows users to define their front-runner places, which will synchronize back to the web portal and across devices. Users can pin Weather tiles to the Start menu to see local weather conditions from multiple locations at a glance. It besides offers satellite maps and has information regarding ski resorts. [ 39 ] The app receives its weather conditions and forecasts from a assortment of sources internationally. Weather uses upwind conditions as the background, making it the only app that does not have a light/dark switch in Windows 10. Weather is not available for io ; however, it comes preinstalled on the Nokia 215 phone from Microsoft Mobile that runs Series 30+ ; it is presently the merely feature earphone to have the app built-in. [ 35 ]

Sports [edit ]

MSN Sports ( in the first place named Bing Sports ) displays versatile sports scores and standings from hundreds of leagues around the world, a well as aggregating sports-related articles and news headlines. [ 41 ] [ 42 ] [ 43 ] [ 44 ] Sports besides allows the user to view slideshows and photograph galleries, look up information about person players and illusion leagues, and set and track their front-runner teams by selecting diverse topics from the hamburger menu. [ 45 ] [ 46 ] It besides powers respective predictive features within Microsoft ‘s Cortana virtual adjunct. [ 47 ]

money [edit ]

MSN Money ( in the first place MoneyCentral, then MSN Moneycentral, before being rebranded as MSN Money in the mid-2000s – anterior to being relaunched as a by-product of Bing Finance ) allows users to set up lists of stocks to watch, follow certain corporations and receive lineage updates, get the latest headlines regarding standard markets, view real-time trade figures with a 30-minute delay, track their own personal finances, calculate mortgages, get information on commodities and bonds, and convert currentness. [ 48 ] [ 49 ] [ 50 ]

E-sports Hub [edit ]

MSN Esports ( much referred to as MSN Esports Hub [ 51 ] ) is a Bing intelligence AI curated web page for the growing esports industry. users can watch desegregate streams from YouTube or Twitch. Microsoft ‘s advanced AI called “ vigil For ” the algorithm primitively made for Microsoft ‘s Mixer is an artificial intelligence that uses Computer sight algorithm on livestreams so that it can alert the spectator of significant moments, this algorithm is implemented in the MSN esport hub. [ 52 ] [ 51 ] Users can besides check the calendar for dates of upcoming e-sport events and tournaments or the news for updates on games and their tournament. After the initiation of MSN ‘s esport hub Microsoft acquired Smash.gg ; an esport tournament platform. [ 53 ]

Discontinued apps [edit ]

Food & Drink [edit ]

MSN Food & Drink ( primitively named Bing Food & Drink ) is a discontinue recipe app that offers news related to food and drink in, a personal shop list that synchronizes across devices and the web, and a wine encyclopedia that contains information on over 1.5 million bottles of wine, over 3.3 million taste notes, and hundreds of cocktail recipes. [ 54 ] Users can control the app hands-free, add their own recipes from forcible cookbook or personal recipes by snapping a photograph, add notes to recipes, and sort the recipes into collections. [ 55 ] The app besides collects data from celebrated chefs and lists them according to their stylus of cuisine. [ 56 ]

Health & Fitness [edit ]

MSN Health & Fitness ( originally named Bing Health & Fitness ) allowed users to track their consumption of calories, look up nutritional information for hundreds of thousands of unlike foods, use a built-in GPS tracker, view bit-by-bit workouts and exercises with images and videos, check symptoms for diverse health conditions, and synchronize their health data to third-party devices such as activity trackers. [ 57 ] [ 58 ] [ 59 ] MSN Health & Fitness once connected data with the Microsoft HealthVault, but it started using a Microsoft bill with MSN ‘s own cloud serve to synchronize data when it was rebranded from Bing to MSN. [ 60 ] [ 61 ] The app is not related in any means to Microsoft ‘s Xbox Fitness or Microsoft Health ( the companion app for the Microsoft Band ), despite being alike in routine. [ 62 ]

locomotion [edit ]

MSN Travel ( in the first place named Bing Travel ) was a travel search engine that allows users to book hotels and flights, aggregates travel-related headlines, and offers detail information about thousands of locomotion destinations. [ 63 ] Data in the app is powered by versatile travel websites, including Expedia, once owned by Microsoft. [ 64 ] other features include finding information on local anesthetic restaurants, viewing pictures ( including panorama ) and historic data about destinations, and reading reviews by previous travelers. [ 65 ] If the exploiter is signed in, Cortana can track flights and get hotel information through the app. [ 66 ] MSN Travel was the only app in the suite that was exclusive to Windows. The app was discontinued in September 2015 but can hush be accessed via the network. [ 67 ] previously, Microsoft had acquired Farecast in 2008, a web site in the calculator reservations system diligence that offered predictions regarding the best time to purchase airline tickets. [ 68 ] Farecast was founded in 2003 and collected over 175 billion airfare observations by 2007. [ 69 ] Farecast ‘s team of datum miners used these airfare observations to build algorithm to predict future airfare price movements. [ 70 ] Microsoft integrated it as separate of its Live Search group of tools in May 2008 as Live Search Farecast ; Microsoft rebranded it as Bing Travel on June 3, 2009, as part of its efforts to create a raw search identity. [ 71 ] In 2009, there were allegations that Bing Travel had copied its layouts from Kayak.com ; Microsoft denied the allegations. [ 72 ] By January 2013, Bing Travel results were powered by Kayak.com. As of January 2014, the menu prediction feature had been removed. As of May 2015, Microsoft rebranded the service to MSN Travel. [ 73 ] In August 2015, MSN Travel flight search pages changed from being powered by Kayak.com to its rival Skyscanner .

Older mobile apps [edit ]

Microsoft first offered content from its MSN web portal site on mobile devices in the early 2000s, through a serve called Pocket MSN ( in note with its Pocket personal computer products of the earned run average ) and late renamed MSN Mobile. The original MSN Mobile software was preloaded on many cell phones and PDAs, and normally provided access to bequest MSN services like blogs ( MSN Spaces ), email ( Hotmail ), clamant message ( MSN Messenger ), and vane search ( now called Bing ). Some wireless carriers charged a premium to access it. [ citation needed ] As many early MSN properties were spun off to Bing, Windows Live, and other successors in the late 2000s, the Microsoft Mobile Services division took over the growth of mobile apps related to those services. In the interim, Microsoft ‘s MSN apps took on a more content-related focus, as did the network portal itself. former versions of MSN apps that were bundled with Windows Mobile and early versions of Windows Phone, [ 74 ] deoxyadenosine monophosphate well as MSN apps for Android and io devices in the early on 2010s, were chiefly repositories for news program articles found on MSN.com. [ 75 ] [ 76 ] [ 77 ] other earlier MSN fluid apps included versions of MSN Weather and MSN Money for Windows Mobile 6.5, [ 78 ] [ 79 ] [ 80 ] and ‘MSN Money Stocks ‘ and a men ‘s magazine called ‘MSN OnIt ‘ for Windows Phone 7. [ 81 ] [ 82 ]

International [edit ]

Microsoft ‘s universe headquarters is in the United States, so the independent MSN web site is based there. however, MSN has offered assorted external versions of its portal since its origin in 1995 for dozens of countries around the earth. [ 5 ] A list of external MSN affiliates is available at MSN Worldwide. [ 83 ] Following the redesign and relaunch of the MSN web portal vein in 2014, most external MSN websites share the same layout as the U.S. web site and are largely indistinguishable from it, aside from their content. There were two exceptions : ninemsn, a longtime partnership between Microsoft and the Nine Network in Australia that launched in 1997 ( Microsoft sold its bet on in the guess and 2013 and ended its co-branding with Nine in 2016 ) ; [ 84 ] and MSN China, an entirely custom-make version of MSN for China ( Microsoft discontinued the portal in 2016, replacing it with a page that links to a number of early Chinese websites ). [ 85 ]

See besides [edit ]

References [edit ]