BIG update to MSN Spaces
Today begins a new era of computing. Your life will never be the same. Seriously.
Well, OK... not really. Your life will
probably be the same... and today may not really indicate the start of a new era of computing - but it's still a very exciting day for the
MSN Spaces team and (hopefully) for our users.
We've just released a bunch of new features today, many of which we've been working on for quite some time... and
most of which were suggested by you guys!
Here's an overview list of everything I can think of.
The Space Craft has a summary of the release as well. Take a look and leave some feedback for the team! Of course there are
hundreds of other fixes and modifications that aren't on this list. I'd be typing all day if I tried to capture it all...
- Spaces Search. This is an incredibly cool feature that lets you find interesting spaces based on keyword, a user's profile information, or by clicking on most popular interests across all of spaces. You can also run a search from any space just by clicking "Search Spaces" in the header above. One thing to mention about the search feature is that it will be ramping up for a few days - but you can help make it better! Learn more about this on The Space Craft.
- Mobile Search from Mobile Spaces! Search for spaces from your mobile device. Mike Smuga will be talking about this more over on his space soon.
- Your own advertising on your space (as an option) to make money from clicks - powered by Kanoodle! (This feature is only available in the United States and Canada at this time.)
- Book lists with Amazon integration. Automatically insert information from Amazon.com directly into your book list - and again, make money through Amazon Associates when people end up buying the book! It's very cool (by the way, our book is called Share Your Story if you want to add it to your book list :)
- Better blog navigation. This feature is one of those things we needed to do. You can now "view more entries" at the bottom of the page, and navigate through Previous and Next pages while looking through blog entries.
- Customized blog entry display. Choose how you want your blog entries to appear, by date or entry title. This is a great feature for people who write essays or incredibly insightful posts once a month. Date isn't really important in this case, whereas sorting by entry title may make more sense.
- Integrated Help. Confused? Click the Learn link in the header above to figure out what to do next!
- Enhanced Profile including General, Social, and Contact Info sections. Each section will have it's own permissions so any part you would like to limit access to (say your personal contact information), you can do it. There's also an updated profile module for the homepage with an actionable photo; anytime you see someone's picture anywhere you can right-click (or click on the down arrow) to view their contact card, space, profile, and more.
- Live Contacts Beta! Brand new feature which you'll see popping up throughout Windows Live in time. What is it? It's the ability to subscribe to automatic contact updates. When your friend changes his or her address or phone number (in their Profile mentioned above), your address book will be automatically updated if you are subscribed to updates. This is crazy cool. Learn more here.
- Which reminds me: Spaces now has contact cards like MSN/Windows Live Messenger! Just right-click on someone's profile photo (or click on the down arrow) and select "View contact card" to see a preview of their space.
- Better commenting for blogs and now photos as well! This feature also has an (optional) clickable profile photo that you can leave behind when leaving a comment. And there's a mini text editor so you can format your comments (something I'm really glad we did!) kinda like blog entries. Note that if you would like to turn off photo comments, you can do this in Settings.
- Photos are no longer limited to 30MB; you can now upload 500 photos per month without worrying about running out of storage space.
- MetaWeblog API (OK, this one is from December – but it's still cool). Read more here.
- Better URLs! Sometimes the little things matter the most. This is one of those things. Say goodbye to /members/. You can now be reached at http://spaces.msn.com/[username]. For example, http://spaces.msn.com/mike now works! We also have cleaner paths to pages, so if you want to give someone a link to your blog or to your photos, you can send them to http://spaces.msn.com/[username]/blog or /photos.
- Xbox Live integration. Themes, recent games module, and gamer card integration! This feature has been the single biggest reason my gamer score is now clocking in at 500 instead of 0. If you're into Xbox Live, these features rock! Check out my theme and gamer card and you can see why.
- New themes and categorized theme picker. We now have well over 100 themes!
- Do you like email or mobile publishing? You can now publish from 3 email addresses instead of just one.
- For those of you with private spaces (you know who you are!) people can now request access to spaces via anonymous email. I like to think about this as "knocking on the door of someone's house".
- Privacy controls (communication preferences) for who can request access to your space and to your contact information and how. Check it out in Settings.
- We doubled the size limit on the HTML PowerToy.
And again: hundreds of other fixes, modifications, tweaks, and overall goodness. One of the things not mentioned above that I'm most excited about is the work we've put into the Spaces platform itself which will enable us to innovate faster and smarter over the next few months and years. This is just the beginning of a wave of coolness... so if your favorite feature isn't listed above, it may be soon!
So, what do you think?
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