5 things I dislike about MSN Spaces
I have been blogging off and on for a little over three years. I started out using Blogger back in late 2001/early 2002 for my personal blog about technology. Since that blog had an average readership of about 4 people each day, once I came to Microsoft I decided to give it up. Part of the reason I decided to drop it at the time was because I was a bit nervous that PR wouldn't be too happy with a blogger ragging on Microsoft products (which I did my fair share of)... so I figured I would just lay low for a while. And I think Microsoft only had a few hundred bloggers at the time (if that!)
Last February, I started StrengthJournal.com on .Text - which has been pretty stagnant for a while now thanks to my new MSN Space. It is feeling what I probably felt when my little sister was born in 1979. Neglected. I need to decide what to do with that site, because I really do love it - but maintaining multiple blogs with a full-time++ job is not easy.
Anyway, my point: I have used a bunch of different tools (and even wrote my own on the .NET Framework beta). Not a single one of them does everything I want it to do, MSN Spaces included. There are places that TypePad outshines us, and there are areas where LiveJournal kicks our butts. Of course, there are also things we do better than they do too :)
But we know we aren't perfect. Hence this post.
Five things I dislike about MSN Spaces:
- I can't use BlogJet to post to my blog today. Not a huge deal, but I love this little tool. Web browsers (Firefox included!) just don't do it for me in the way of text editing.
- We don't have enough themes, which means there isn't enough differentiation between spaces. People come in a lot of flavors.
- We don't have comments on anything other than blog entries, which means a lot of people are using comments to either a) comment on photos, or b) comment on the space itself.
- The Statistics page doesn't roll-up RSS aggregator "hits", only web page-views. I want to know who is reading this post in various aggregators.
- The recent blog entry on the MSN Messenger 7.0 beta contact card doesn't show enough information to compel me to visit the user's space.
Disclaimer: I am just one member of the MSN Spaces team. There are a bunch of us, and I can almost 100% guarantee that not a single person would have the same 5 items on their list. Additionally, just because I don't like something doesn't mean we are already "fixing it" - but it doesn't mean we aren't either!
Basically what I am saying: these are just my personal thoughts. Don't read too far into them.
So, what do you dislike? Have you added your requests to our wiki over on Channel 9 yet? Have you sent us email via the Feedback button below? Have you commented on my blog? If so, we have heard you loud and clear. If not, why not?