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The IEBlog on the MSDN network that talks about everything Internet Explorer recently made a post explaining how pinned sites work on Windows 8 and how they are much more than just bookmarks.

Pinned Websites On Windows 8 Come With Badges And Intelligent Color Mapping

Windows 8 continues on its path towards a worldwide commercial release and in its wake it brings in host of new experience features. One of the main points of interest is how the Metro UI version of the new IE10 internet browser works. Other than being a completely new browsing experience, it also brings in a new way to bookmark your favorites sites that is more than just plain vanilla bookmarking.

One of the best features of the new Metro is the Live Tiles feature where every tile that is pinned on the Start Screen updates itself with relevant information whenever required. Similarly, websites pinned to the Start Screen will also act as Live Tiles with just a little support from the websites themselves.

Windows 8 has built-in features that support updating a pinned website badge every 30 minutes, 1 hours, 3 hours and so on till once every day. This appears on the Pinned website tile as a count of unseen updates. The data is pulled from a location that is specified by the website itself and the frequency is also set by the website itself. So the user doesn’t have to do any of the hard work. Just pin the website and Windows 8 will know what to do as long as the website has the right kind of settings written in to the site.

The tile creation process itself is interesting. You can choose the title of the title when it is being created and the color is automatically chosen by the system. The choice is based on the dominant color of the website and the icon. So you have easy color association too when you pin the website. Once you get used to this, plain old pinning and bookmarking will just not cut it. If Microsoft can keep this up, the adoption rates of Windows 8 should be quite good.