LiveSide - Interview Blog : Spaces

Lots of new stuff just added to Spaces

Kip Kniskern — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 11:59:00 GMT

Some new stuff and some interesting numbers from Spaces: it's now available in 51 countries in 25 languages, there have been 93 million spaces created since Spaces was released, and more than 111 million people a month use Spaces. More than ~~18 million photos~~ 8 million photos (corrected, see Chris Keating's comment below) a day are uploaded to Spaces, with over 4 billion photos added since day 1. So with that here's the list of improvements Spaces will be announcing in the morning:

Windows Live Spaces is adding a bunch of new features as we speak including:

A new home page with information on people in your social network and new stuff on your Spaces like comments, messages, and pending requests.
More customization features with more colors and themes, and now the ability to upload and add a custom image as a background for your space
A new Guestbook feature (finally, woohoo!)
A new messaging feature - send a message to "your Spaces friends and meet other people on Spaces by sending them messages". Hover over a picture profile and you'll see a "send a message" link, or use the link in the Visitor tools module on a person's space.
Lots of added functionality to Gadgets and Modules, including spanning the full width of a column, removing borders, and changing titles, and a new ability to add multiple modules at the top or bottom of your space that span all of the columns - "perfect for your space title and tagline". You can also have more than one of the same gadget on your space.
Improvements to photo management, including a new page for viewing and editing albums on your space, and a new layout for individual photos pages, making it easier and faster to view your photos and see all comments at a glance.
Improved Mobile interaction with Spaces, including the ability to see at a glance recent updates and comments on your space, add, delete, view, and browse your friends, and view profile information, all from your mobile device.
Book and music lists are improved, and they look better in narrow view
Some dev improvements, too: including individual rss feeds for profiles, photo albums, blog categories, top-level directories, friends, and lists; a new set of APIs for sending messages, adding gadgets, and adding modules; and support for one-click customization of gadgets when added to a space.

You can check out The Space Craft for more information on the new features (the blog entry will be up in the morning), and we'll be bringing you more on them here, too, of course .

Windows Live Spaces Tour, Part 2: Gadgets

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 06:20:00 GMT

With Spaces being released yesterday ( not without a few glitches ), we continue to take a look at the new features with Part 2 of the audio tour, this time with Jay Fluegel on Gadgets. Definitely a program in it's infancy, there's not much yet...(read more)

Windows Live Spaces Audio Tour Part One: Social Networking

Kip Kniskern — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 07:49:00 GMT

Moz Hussain , Group Program Manager for Spaces, and Jay Fluegel , Lead PM, Spaces, invited me to come to Redmond last Friday and get a little preview of a couple of the new aspects of Spaces; Social Networking and Gadgets. In the first half of this audio...(read more)

Interview with Moz Hussain of Spaces

Kip Kniskern — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 06:48:00 GMT

I interviewed Moz Hussain, a Product Planner for Spaces, last week, talking about how Windows Live will change Spaces, how it is changing the way the Spaces team works, and what to expect from Spaces in the coming months. We talked about some of the differences...(read more)

Talking With Torres

Harrison Hoffman — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 03:47:00 GMT

I sat down with Mike Torres , Lead Program Manager for MSN Spaces to talk about the recent Spaces 10.5 release. Here's some key points in the interview: 0:00 Introduction 1:21 History of Spaces 3:15 Why the delay? 6:50 What's your favorite new...(read more)