IE10 - Pinned Sites in Windows 8

[Corrine]

Snippets from Pinned Sites in Windows 8 - IEBlog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

The Windows 8 Start screen is the best place to find and stay connected to all your favorite apps and content. App tiles are alive with activity and show you fresh and tailored content so you know what’s new in your world.

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Consumers on Windows spend most of their time on the Web and we know from Windows opt-in telemetry (officially, the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program), that they go back to the same set of sites time and again. Pinned sites on Windows 8 make it fast and easy to immediately get to your sites. With badge notifications, site tiles come alive with up-to-date information and help you know when new content is available.

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Windows 8 can poll for updates for pinned tiles on the Start screen. This works well for lightweight notifications such as new messages from other users (email & social networking), new discounts on a shopping site, new articles on a newsfeed etc.

With Internet Explorer 10 and Windows 8, you can offer badge notifications directly on your pinned site tiles. This means users get updates to their sites without the site being open in the browser. As an example, pin the Fresh Tweets demo using IE10 on Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The pinned site tile updates on a regular basis and notifies the user when there are new tweets available.

How much time do people actually spend on the desktop that they'd actually see site tile updates?

Personally, the sites I visit regularly are opened in tabs when I launch the browser. A refresh tab would be a lot faster and easier than returning to the desktop and locating the appropriate tile to see if there has been a "site tile update".

I guess it will fit how some people use their computer but since I haven't found pinned sites of any value added for me in Windows 7, that could be why I don't appreciate the value of site tile updates.

 

[reventon]

I seem to recall something similar in 98/XP - the concept of Active Desktop.