Apr. 4, 2007

Two things may always be certain: Weather and taxes. Recently MSN.com has made changes intended to help you with both.

In recent months, Rolling Hills Estates, Calif. resident Jim wrote in twice, voicing frustration shared by other users who lamented the default appearance of New York conditions in the weather box on the homepage.

A couple of weeks ago, MSN rolled out a solution that should please weather watchers, including three different people named Joe, who complained from Phoenix, Erie, Pa., and St. Paul, Minn., as well as Ruth, of Fort Worth, Texas. Ruth wrote, "I would like the ability, once my weather selections have been set, to … not revert to New York City. My weather selections sometimes are critical for the safety of my family and I do depend on them."

The key to solving the problem rested with technology. After months of toil, MSN's Global Homepage Engineering Team implemented a long-desired enhancement called geo-targeting, which enables the machinery behind the homepage to take a pretty good guess at where you are and automatically deliver news and weather that is local.

"This is a huge move forward in making the homepage even more relevant to the user," says Dave Horecny, chief of the technology team charged with improving the performance of MSN sites worldwide. "We’ve been looking forward to this for a long time."

This change comes with the ability to be able to detect users coming from international locations, allowing them to opt for, say, an Indian or Belgian version of MSN better tailored for them.

To feel the full impact of the change, however, some users will have to get rid of some of their cookies, so to speak. Let me explain. When people travel the Internet, they gather things called cookies from Web sites that would like to know when someone has visited or come back. Cookies don't identify you personally, they just indicate that your computer has visited a Web site before and, among other things, save whatever personal settings you may have chosen.

But if, like some users, you keep getting New York weather and you live in, say, Arizona, it is because you have a cookie that you don't want and you need to delete it (unless, of course, you want Manhattan conditions). Here's how:

For Internet Explorer 7, click on “Tools” then "Delete browsing history" and push the button labeled "Delete cookies;" close the browser and relaunch it.  If you are using IE6, click on “Tools” in the menu, then “Internet Options”; on the “General” tab, click the “Settings” button, and then click the “View files” button. In the window that opens, you can delete specific or all cookies. Click OK twice to finish. In Mozilla Firefox, Go to “Tools,” and “Clear Private Data” and tick the cookies box, then the “Clear” button.

With this technology in place, we still can't deliver always-sunny skies, but this technological advancement is an example of changes MSN is working toward to improve your online experience.

Likewise, heading into tax season, the MSN Money team has delved into refining various Web technologies and applications to deliver new content experiences. First among more than a dozen forthcoming Money presentations is Tax Time Countdown, which allows people to explore the information from the main page or from each article via a newly designed video player.

"The Money team has made the decision to make a major investment in interactive information, using Flash right now," Money managing editor Art Lenehan declared. "We feel that we have the opportunity to make financial information a lot more fun, more relevant and more enriching for our users. And if we do that, MSN comes out a winner, too. "

I can already see users' eyes rolling back in their heads or yawning over the idea of tax information being entertaining, but this package is, infused by tax expert Jeff Schnepper's energy in the video presentations and with specialized interactive graphics.

"When you can build some fun interactivity into the charts and get the video adding motion, that’s where you make the Web a heck of a lot more engaging," Lenehan explained. "I think there’s a lot of potential for rich media within MSN — on the platform we call WPF in the future. That's Windows Presentation Format, which has some promise beyond what we see in Flash today."

For now, though, as a chunk of Americans scurry to submit their taxes by April 17, this tax package has elements designed to be helpful. Chief among them is the initial question to ask, which is, should you do your own taxes? And if the answer is yes, then you will do well to explore sections like five audit red flags and extreme write-offs.

The MSN Money team welcomes your feedback on the new tax package, but if you can't share your thoughts until after April 17, we understand. Life is all about balancing priorities, and continuing to develop new approaches to serving you better remains a major priority at MSN.