As MC talks about here, we hit a pretty significant milestone today - 1.5 million MSN Spaces created, the majority of them coming since our global launch on 12/2/04.  So in just over a month, the MSN Spaces product without any major advertising or marketing campaigns, has become a pretty major player in the social software arena - despite being pretty late to the game ;)

Of course, we are incredibly psyched to see our sign-up rate increasing day-by-day for what is essentially a version 1.0 with a lot of rough edges, but we aren't going to sit idly by and gloat.  That wouldn't be within the self-critical nature of Microsoft, now would it? :)  What is more important to us is that people (you) are using your space once you set it up, that you find it adds value in your everyday life, and that your space can adapt to your unique needs.  This is what is going to define success for us in the long-run.  So although 1.5 million is exciting (really exciting), the ultimate metric for us is being useful in your life.

Our "engagement" numbers (how many people are actually using their Space) are high as well.  We believe this has a lot to do with the fact that we are integrated so tightly into the MSN Messenger beta; it is pretty hard to let your space grow stale when you have friends and family expecting a "gleam" every once in a while!  The fact that we have integrated these two incredibly social experiences in a way that regularly reminds people of the value of posting photos, wishlists, or thoughts to their Space is one of the reasons I think we have seen our numbers climbing like crazy.  When you are chatting with your friends and see other friends start to gleam in your MSN Messenger contact list, you immediately realize how lame you look for letting a week go by without posting something witty!

Another great engagement feature is RSS.  RSS has made it possible for people like you and me to track friends, family, or complete strangers using a number of tools (NewsGator, Bloglines, My MSN) in a way that encourages quality over quantity and keeps important people from falling off of your radar due to forgetfulness.  What do I mean by this?  If you look back at just a few years ago at the "GeoCities phenomenon", you can see immediately why it didn't pan-out the way people expected it to.  It is a pain in the ass to go check the websites of your 25 friends everyday to see if something has changed.  Now, you don't have to... you use RSS!  Subscribing to someone's RSS feed is basically like saying "please make sure I don't miss anything this person has to say... ever."  And because of this new persistent relationship, the author can think through what he or she is trying to say a little bit more - because they aren't posting just for the sake of posting.  They are posting to say something, and this is a very different thing than tediously posting anything to keep people coming back everyday.

And once you subscribe to an RSS feed, it takes an awful lot of "noise" to get you to unsubscribe.  That, in and of itself, is the beauty of RSS.  It creates relationships.

Which brings me to the other announcement today.  Sometime VERY soon, My MSN will be live with RSS support.  This hasn't been officially announced yet, so this is a bit of advance notice.

Quote from MC's Space:

Since all public Spaces have RSS feeds associated with them, you can add a Space’s RSS feed link to your MyMSN page, and read what is going on at Jay’s Krib right next to the New York Times!

Very cool!

To subscribe to my space in My MSN, click here.  Absolutely no guarantee that the link will work yet [update 1/13: it hasn't shipped yet, but will soon], but give it a shot and see if it does!  Big congratulations to the My MSN team for cranking this out in such a short amount of time and helping us "close the loop" within the MSN network for publishing and subscribing to RSS.  Of course, just like Spaces, the rest of MSN has a lot of things in the works around RSS; this is just the start.

OK, off to a geek dinner with some Microsoft folks!  I think I may be the only non-geek there.

Update: For the record, that was supposed to be a joke.  Also - it might be a little more time on My MSN's RSS support - but trust me, it's coming!