Earthling

Can you sum up what it does?

Our drag-and-drop feature gives users an interactive means to reflow the layout of their main my.earthlink.net page to their taste, beyond the more basic interface available when clicking the "Edit this Page" button at the top-left hand corner of the page.

When hovering over a movable widget's header, the mouse pointer will turn into a "move" icon, with a tooltip indicating what to do:
"Hold the mouse down over the feature's header to move it about the page".

If we did our job well, what to do next should be obvious. If it isn't, we do want to know ... *gulp*. :-)

How does it compare to the implementations on Live.com and Google?

Standards and most web browsers have evolved over the past few years to enable many key building blocks, none of which do however give you the built-in ability to reflow a document's layout by moving widgets around. As developers, we still face many challenges, which we address in different ways.

Google's and Microsoft's implementations don't, at this time, seem to solve the problem of "dragging widgets beyond the fold". I chose to solve that problem, which many of us felt results in a more streamlined experience. You'll notice that your My EarthLink document will scroll as you move a feature toward the edges of the browser.

To be fair however, our implementation is merely an unobtrusive, incremental feature that keeps our original layout intact. Our portal is vastly more "vertical": the breadth of our content often causes a lot of vertical scrolling . Microsoft and Google's go to great lengths to keep as many widgets above the fold as possible, which is a very nice touch.

Google and Microsoft also have a more spectacular approach to moving widgets around. The document reflows itself before you even release the mouse button, which could easily startle a less web-savvy crowd. It startled me :) I prefer Microsoft's red outline to Google's widget clone, which is a bit confusing.

Our approach is more subtle: you get to drag a slightly dimmed version of your widget, and a red line indicates where you're about to "drop" the widget. Should you release the mouse button, at which point only, the entire document reflows itself giving you a feel closer to other drag-and-drop paradigms you might have been accustomed to.

Beyond drag and drop, both our competitors' portals are packed with dynamic user interface elements, and they're doing an amazing job exploring the limits of what web browsers can do.

When you remove a widget in our drag and drop, you get a full-sized confirmation screen asking if you’re sure you want to remove that widget. I found that a little jarring – like it takes you out of the experience of seeing everything happen in front of your eyes. Why do we do that?

I hear you :) Part of me really wants that little [x] square to just make the widget “go away”, right now! We did explore that route, with working proofs-of-concept. But there are a few usability issues we’ve run into -- most notably the “close” square being very close to the minimize [_] square in our current user interface.

We want to minimize instances of users accidentally removing a widget from their page.

We placed an inline interstitial confirmation dialog to address this issue. That worked pretty well. We also needed to re-render the “additional features widget”, to show the feature we just removed. But our implementation added more weight to the page than we were willing to live with. For little added benefit.

Until we get time to re-factor things, we felt drag and drop was a comparatively lighter, less obtrusive addition to the page, and a more valuable piece of functionality.

Our competitors have given themselves the opportunity to go “all-out” with snazzy dynamic user interface features. We adopted a more evolutionary approach :).

Which versions work on which browsers?

Live.com works in Windows Microsoft Internet Explorer and, as of recently, Firefox. My EarthLink's drag and drop feature works on Safari (we're *very* fond of Mac OS X), all Gecko browsers (Firefox, Mozilla, Camino, etc.) in Mac, Windows, X11, Opera (Mac and Windows) and possibly more in X11-land, which I haven't actively tested recently.

And of course it works in Windows Internet Explorer.

The Google portal seems to work on all these browsers as well.

Anything else to add?

For the time being, we've been primarily focusing on doing our best implementing some insanely useful, user friendly, and visually welcoming features into our portal. A few of my favorites are:

• My eBay tracker widget: Launched in early 2004, to this day, still one of the best web-based eBay auction tracking tools on the web.
  
• My Movies widget: Direct links to buy tickets, and movie trailers available in QuickTime, Real, and Windows Media, in a nifty viewer.
  
• Local News: Keep in touch with what's going on in your neighborhood, powered by the cool folks from Topix.net.
  
• Our Google search [ed: officially it's web search powered by Google] offers some cool features such as relevant shopping results and the ability to save searches and search results to your EarthLink favorites, available to you near ubiquitously at http://favorites.earthlink.net and the various toolbars we offer for Firefox and Windows Internet Explorer.

Now that our portal is open to the public (since mid-2005), many of us developers are looking forward to friendly competition with the big guys...we may be a small portal team, but we're fierce and dedicated :).

Thanks, Chris. I should add that Chris is probably less-than-available to check and respond to comments through the holidays, but he does check in from time to time. He'll have more time for the likes of us in the new year.

To try our drag and drop feature for yourself, create a free account and grab a widget. Let me know what you think.