Spaces launched a new build last week, notably with the ability to embed videos.  But there's quite a bit new under the hood, too.  Jason Antonelli of the Spaces team posted on his blog about some of the new improvements.

Of course the embedded video is the big news, and support for "dozens of new markets" - with more to come.  Jason also fixed a bug "that prevented me from removing ads from the top of the page using sponsored spaces feature".  Nice to be able to fix bugs when they really bother you!

Jason also reveals that a lot of work went into a new mechanism to deploy new Spaces builds without affecting the live site.  Remember the mess during the switch from MSN Spaces to Windows Live Spaces (10.5)?  Well that's been fixed.

Some other improvements (from Jason's blog entry): 

• We did a lot of cleanup work -- including making a small step towards XHTML compliance, running static code analysis tools on our code base, moving to better libraries and practices to prevent XSS-type exploits, etc.
• We moved to an entirely new configuration system -- the Spaces application has 100s of settings that can be configured -- we moved to a much better system to manage this.
• Several releases back we moved our recent updates and recent tags logic to a different service which was causing all sorts of problems -- we basically rewrote this code (which somewhat just told me about a bug that I need to fix :-)
• Lots, lots more.