Remember the whole “portal” craze? A couple of years ago everything on the web was about aggregation and “one stop shopping.” Here in Charlottetown we taxpayers wasted a good part of $4.5 million creating VirtualCharlottetown.com, a “Charlottetown portal.” Hell, even I jumped on the bandwagon.

Thankfully, though, portals went away when it collectively dawned on us all that the browser and the web are the portal; we didn’t need an additional layer of intermediating abstraction pasted over it.

Microsoft, however, doesn’t appear to have been listening; witness their description of their new “Windows Live” project:

Windows Live is a set of personal Internet services and software designed to bring together in one place all of the relationships, information and interests people care about most, with more safety and security features across their PC, devices and the Web.

Smells like a portalization play to me. Not just a portal, either: a Web 2.0 portal. Yawn.