MSN gets far less attention than the company’s Bing or Windows Live efforts, the home page remains an important economic engine for Microsoft’s online business, as well as a significant source of search traffic for Bing. “We believe it’s an important asset for Microsoft,” said MSN general manager Bob Visse. The site is still the top portal in about 25 of the 46 markets, with about 600 million unique users globally and 100 million in the US, where it trails Yahoo in popularity. The redesign, which has been in the works for months, bears quite a bit of resemblance to the one that Microsoft had been testing in France. Microsoft began rolling out the new MSN home page (click for preview), which it says will become widely available in the US early in 2010. With its new look, the home page has about half as many links as the previous incarnation, focusing instead on a few categories, such as video, news, shopping, and search. The old site had dozens of text links at the top and bottom of the page for everything from horoscopes to white pages to a free trial of MSN’s dial-up Internet service.

Microsoft is also trying to tap into the popularity of social networks, adding a column on the right-hand side that lets users peek at their Windows Live, Twitter, and Facebook feeds, and even update their status or post a tweet. As before, users can also see a preview of their Hotmail in-box. But it will take its time in jumping on the Web apps bandwagon, with plans to offer several Silverlight-based apps on the right-hand side of the redesigned page at a later date. In the past, MSN users have not customized their pages to a large degree, and so Microsoft is going to take a wait-and-see approach before it decides whether it will roll out more apps than the Windows Live, Twitter, and Facebook apps available at launch. By contrast, Yahoo, perhaps MSN’s largest competitor, has bet the farm on the popularity of Web apps on the home page, redesigning the entire Yahoo experience with that in mind. It’s still early, but since the redesign went live Yahoo has seen a 20 percent increase in the amount of time spent on the home page, it said last week.