Microsoft Begins Rolling Out Newly Redesigned MSN Homepage

Microsoft announced today on the MSN Blog that it has finally started to roll out the newly redesigned MSN homepage, which the Redmond-based company calls “its most significant homepage redesign in over a decade.” A preview of the design was actually released last year in November, giving us all a sneak peak of what was to come. Fast forward four months, and the new design is finally being released to end-users across the United States. Do take into account that it will be a few weeks before the 100 million MSN users in the U.S. get to see the new homepage.

As Erictric has reported before, and it’s clearly demonstrated in the images, the new design incorporates an updated butterfly logo, a bigger Bing search box, a cleaner and sleeker interface, and more than 30 other updates added based on 70,000 instances of customer feedback. It’s also worth mentioning that the integration with the Bing search engine appears to be more profound.

The new MSN homepage also includes the following features:

• TrendWatch - highlights of the day’s top Twitter trends
• Hyper-local Tweets – shows you tweets based on your location
• My Cities - lets you save up to three cities to keep up with
• MSN Local - enables the display of relevant local information
• Hotmail - see your inbox on the MSN homepage

Additionally, the new design include tighter integration with social networking services like Twitter, Facebook, and Windows Live “What’s New.”

According to Microsoft, the new homepage has yielded phenomenal results during early tests, specially when it comes to the newly added social networking features. The company also states that Bing has seen a big increase in search queries coming from the new MSN homepage.

To learn more about the new MSN homepage click here, and check out a screenshot below.

What do you think of the new MSN homepage?

[ via Ars Technica, Neowin.net ]