A couple of MSN betas snuck out into the world this week.

In his post MSN Shopping Officially Launches New Beta Site, Chris Jolley talks about the new http://beta.shopping.msn.com. Some of the new features include

• RSS Feeds – it remains to be seen how aggressively consumers take to this, but I think it's super-cool how we are embracing an emerging technology.    
• Ratings & Reviews - allows consumers to see what other consumers think of a product, providing them with increased confidence in their purchase decisions
• Ability to browse our complete selection through an easy-to-understand taxonomy and powerful search
• Refine searches with expanded, relevant criteria
  •  By price, rating, popularity, name, best match
  • Multiple Views - Results can be viewed in three different views
• Usability enhancements:
  • Recently viewed– helpful little personalization feature that helps continuity between sessions
  • Compare prices across stores, find out who has free shipping, hot deals, etc.
  • Clean and consistent UI – The UI is clean and simple and designed to NOT get in the user's way
• Useful Merchandising – Comprehensive set of merchandising, including the Gift Center , Seasonal Shops & Guides , and more

I met with the PM who owns the RSS feeds feature a few months ago to talk about my scenarios and its great to see that it's finally out there. I use the Amazon RSS feeds all the time and can definitely see myself getting some use out of the news feeds from MSN Shopping. All I can say about the ratings & reviews feature is...FINALLY. I've already begun to scheme about how I can convince Mike that we should totally gank learn from the feature in Yahoo 360° where you can include your reviews on your "space".

The MSN Screensaver beta is also out. Some of the features include

Personalize with background photos and news and weather information from MSN or any RSS feeds from websites you choose.

Search the Web and click news headlines directly from the Screen Saver.

Stay connected with Hotmail, MSN Messenger, and MSN Spaces. Track how many unread Hotmail messages and current Messenger conversations you have, and display blogs and photos from your friends’ MSN Spaces.

Some of the features of the screen saver are so useful I'm wondering why they are wasted on an app that typically runs when the user is away from the computer.

And finally, http://www.start.com/myw3b has some new features. Sanaz Ahari has a blog post entitled new things on start.com... where she writes

first and foremost, check out our new search results:

- we now have tabbed results that include web, news and rss , so you don't need to do seperate types of search we just give you all the results and it's all ajax based of course

- the rss resutls are very cool, cause you can just subcribe by clicking on subscribe and they'll get added to your feed

 

we've also added themes : ice, granite and ocean... ice is my favorite :)

super easy to navigate, needless to say all in place and no refreshes required.

 

we got rid of our not so useful home link and folder view - so now when you click on a folder we don't replace your dashboard with the content of that folder... yes, we listen to our user feedback :)

 

lastly you can now hit the esc button to close your overlay modules - super usable...

There's a followup post on the start.com weblog entitled more on start: OPML support and popular feeds which states that they added support for importing OPML files as well.  

Postscript: Anyone notice what all three of these betas have in common? (Hint: Starts with R ends with S and has an S in the middle).