LiveSide - News blog : Spaces

Spaces Team shuts down their blog (eh, what?)

Kip Kniskern — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 00:45:39 GMT

From the News of the Weird Department, the team that makes the blogging software for Microsoft, Windows Live Spaces, has decided to shut down their, umm, blog. Posts on The Space Craft and Windows Live Wire announced on Friday that the two would be merging, with content appearing on Windows Live Wire (the Windows Live team blog). Judging by the numbers of commenters on the posts asking for help with their Windows Live issues, it seems to us that Windows Live needs MORE blogs, not less, but maybe that’s just us. The posts helpfully provide links to the Windows Live Twitter account, and to the Windows Live Messenger Facebook page, apparently just to add an even more surreal spin to the story.

Of course we know probably better than anyone how tough it is to blog consistently about Windows Live, but we’ve always found it slightly bizarre that there aren’t lots more Spaces bloggers. Rob Dolin has done a good job, and there are others, but this is one team at Microsoft who don’t seem to know how to eat their own dogfood.

Changes to the Spaces header

Sunshine — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 18:22:12 GMT

Did you miss your Windows Live Navigation menu on Windows Live Spaces? Not anymore, the Team just posted the following:

Today we're making a change to Spaces that is a direct result of the feedback you gave us here on the Windows Live team blog, on the Space Craft blog, and via the feedback form. We heard that earlier changes we’d made to the Spaces header actually caused you confusion and made it more difficult to navigate to other Windows Live services after viewing someone’s personal space.

As a result, we’re beginning to update Spaces today to add the standard Windows Live navigation links across the top, so you have a consistent way to navigate to and from all the Windows Live services.

Here’s the old header in Spaces:

And here’s the new one:

If you don’t see the new header yet, wait a day or so – we’ve got a lot of users to roll this out to, and it generally takes a little while to get updates out to everyone.

I just checked on mine and it has already been updated for me, how about yours? Go, check out your space now.

Jamie gets mad at spam and Spaces; and hears about new anti-spam measures

Kip Kniskern — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:49:18 GMT

Jamie Thomson, an avid blogger and Windows Live enthusiast, blogs regularly on his Spaces blog about Windows Live, but today he had enough. Having to deal with and delete 51 comment spam posts on a recent blog entry in the space of an hour got the best of him, and he fired off a rant, calling out Spaces for their perceived lack of attention to comment spam:

As happy as I am to see Windows Live Wave 3 rolling out this week and as much as I offer my thanks and congratulations to the people that built it I can no longer hide my anger and resentment toward those same people –some of which I have met and dined with- that have habitually failed to address this rampant abuse of Live Spaces. Why is this not a priority?

Luckily for Jamie, one of the comments on to his rant he didn't delete was from Marcus Schmidt from Microsoft, who responded with a list of what Spaces is and will be doing about comment spam, starting with the new release that we're expecting at any time now from www.spaces.live.com:

I've talked to the Spaces team and this is what we're doing with the Wave 3 release that is rolling out today to help mitigate the spam problem:
1. We've taken some measures on the backend that will reduce the amount of comment spam
2. We're actively looking for and disabling spammer accounts
3. We've built a better recent comments page that will allow you to see up to 50 recent comments on one page and delete any spam comments from that page.
4. We're continuing to invest in anti-spam and abuse measures that will roll out in future releases.
Plus we're doing some more secretive stuff that I can't really declare publicly because it would tip off the spammers.

Good to hear from Marcus and Spaces on this, and although the comment spam issue is a lot bigger than Spaces (it's why we ask you to log in to LiveSide to leave a comment, for example), spam is never fun to deal with.

Windows Live Spaces Wave 3 Update Promises Cleaner, Better Looking Space

Sunshine — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:48:00 GMT

Just like the other sites/services , Windows Live Spaces is also getting a Wave 3 overhaul. Can’t stay behind now can they? Over at The Spaces Team Blog , they already started to blog about the upcoming changes. Coming soon… Changes to Windows Live Spaces...(read more)

Windows Live Wave 3 beta urls show up

Chris — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 22:38:11 GMT

A couple of weeks ago we started noticing an interesting referrer popping up in the stats for some of our posts. Turns out Microsoft moved their Wave 3 services from the dogfood servers onto beta servers, and as a result some MSFT employees were clicking through to us from http://home-beta.live.com. You won’t be able to sign in to any of the beta sites yet if you’re not on the approved list (the betas haven’t started yet if you’re worried), but here’s a few gems we learnt while digging around.

Note – as the new sites are locked down, these are just features we’ve spotted/inferred from looking around the existing sites that are running side-by-side. What’s great is that now new features can be tested before being rolled out to the general public, something which Spaces has needed ever since one of its updates rendered the service unusable for several weeks.

Windows Live Home Beta (http://home-beta.live.com) – As mentioned above, softies are clicking through to us from this site, thanks to the new homepage having default groups of feeds that users can subscribe to. Looks like this new homepage could have similar features to my.live.com, so it’ll be interesting to see how much functionality they duplicate.

Windows Live Profile Beta (http://profile-beta.live.com) – Sorry Jason and Sabina but you’re our demos (everybody else had personal photos up). You can see from these feeds that photo albums are now stored on Skydrive. That means you can now use your Skydrive storage across multiple services, which should please a lot of people.

Windows Live Photos Beta (http://photos-beta.live.com) – The front-end user interface to the photos stored on Skydrive, see below. This means you now start to share your 5GB of storage across Windows Live services, which hopefully is a sign of further consolidation in the storage area. Lets face it, we have too much scattered storage already (about 30GB worth!)

Windows Live Skydrive Beta (http://skydrive-beta.live.com) – With photos going to be stored on Skydrive, there’s more privacy options you can set, as shown by the new icon below. This means photos won’t necessarily be visible to the public, giving users some control over content that’s currently lacking in the existing Spaces photo albums.

And for completeness, the urls of the other beta sites:

Windows Live Groups Beta (http://groups-beta.live.com), Windows Live Spaces Beta (http://spaces-beta.live.com) and Windows Live Events Beta (http://events-beta.live.com)

Let us know if you find anything: tips [at] liveside d0t net

Linked Live IDs Getting Pushed On Windows Live Spaces

ScottIsAFool — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 05:25:18 GMT

I logged into my developer blog today (although we have had a couple of reports of sightings prior to this) to discover a message waiting for me which shows that Microsoft are starting to really push the linked Windows Live IDs that came in last October. This shows that some of the big changes we're expecting around People (and Photos) are starting to see the light of day:

So this fits in with the time frame we expect for Wave 3, so will make it interesting to see what other changes they will be making to the content of Live Spaces users as well as the other services (think: What’s New feed).

Remember, if you spot anything else that’s new, you can email us at tips[at]liveside[dot]net or through our contact form.

Live Spaces Vision - get blog updates in (near) real-time

Sunshine — Fri, 16 May 2008 21:23:55 GMT

So many blogs, so little time. There are over 112 million blogs on the Internet! How do you keep up? You can take Live Spaces Vision for a spin! Yea really, a spin! Beware not to get dizzy while this shows you all recently updated Windows Live Spaces. Watch that Virtual Earth globe go round and round and round....

You can watch in 2D or 3D, the first time you start 3D mode you will be asked to install Virtual Earth 3D. To tilt and rotate the map, hold the 'CTRL' key on the keyboard whilst pressing your left mouse button. Scroll the mouse to rotate the globe on its axis.

Looking for a specific (interest) blog? There's also Interest Space Mode, as shown in the picture above. Just type in your specific interest in the search box, click submit and of you go! Interesting what/who you can find that way...I found John Bruno, Lead Program Manager at Microsoft (picture above).

To go to the Live Space Profile, click on the thumbnail in the recently viewed window (I'll call it the Collection Bar). This bar is shown below the map, scroll down a bit if you don't see it, I had to as well. I just wish the thumbnails wouldn't disappear when the search starts over to give me some time to click on them...I didn't find a way to stop the search either...

Live Spaces Vision is a stream of global updates to the Windows Live Space network of local market sites in near real-time. Live Spaces Vision joins FlickrVision, TwitterVision, and WikipediaVision in the vision map genre. This was achieved by using the publicly available Changes Feed and Virtual Earth SDK.

Evangelised by Rick Stock and Jason Christie in London, UK. Developed by Cyokin Zhang and Jamie He in Shanghai, CN.

Go and give it a spin, it can be reached through www.livespacevision.com or http://specials.uk.msn.com/livespacesvision

Whilst playing with this I thought how cool it would be to have this for your buddy list! Not only would you be up to date on their Live Spaces but it will show you where they reside at the same time! Could someone please.... *fantasizes some more* .... additional link in Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Spaces friends list...

More info: Live Spaces Vision - MSN On Windows Live UK

Changes to Windows Live Spaces

Sunshine — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:07:06 GMT

There are a few changes to Windows Live Spaces based on feedback the team received.

Based on what we've heard from you, here's the latest round of changes we've made:

You now have the ability to remove updates from specific people in the what's new area of your Spaces home page.

At the bottom of your (signed-in) Spaces home page, you now have an “Options” link.

Clicking “Options” will take you to a “What’s new Options” page where you can choose who of your Spaces friends and Messenger contacts show up on your home page.

Other changes:

We've added back your list descriptions for all lists when they are displayed in the narrow column

The font for custom lists is no longer bold by default

We changed the Sponsored Results module to reflect the transition of our partnership with Kanoodle

We've made some additional smaller changes which you won’t see but which will further improve the Spaces service

We hope you enjoy these changes. As always, keep the feedback coming. We are listening.

- Chris

Full article: The Space Craft: Your feedback = Changes to Windows Live Spaces

Windows Live Spaces loses 15% of unique visitors in US over the last year

Kip Kniskern — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 09:57:40 GMT

According to some new numbers included in an email from Nielsen Online today, Windows Live Spaces, never a big player in the US market for social networking tools, lost significant ground over the past year.

Nielsen Online provides February's top U.S. social networking sites and blogs
for your reference. They are ranked by unique audience and rounded to the nearest
thousand, so MySpace.com had 55.4 million unique visitors in February 2008, growing
4 percent over February 2007.
Please note that these are custom lists compiled by the Nielsen Online PR team
with the help of our media analysts. While these lists are not meant to be exhaustive,
they provide a good idea of the significant players in each space.

Table 1: Top 10 Social Networking Sites for February 2008(U.S., Home and Work)
+----------------------+------------+-------------+-----------+
| Site                 | UA (000) | UA (000)   | % Change |
|                      |   Feb-08   |   Feb-07    |           |
+----------------------+------------+-------------+-----------+
| Myspace.com          |   55,419   |   53,362    |    4%     |
| Facebook             |   20,043   |    9,923    |   102%    |
| Classmates Online    |   12,955   |   12,815    |    1%     |
| Windows Live Spaces |   7,882    |    9,253    |   -15%    |
| LinkedIn             |   7,392    |    1,990    |   271%    |
| AOL Hometown         |   6,004    |    8,907    |   -33%    |
| Club Penguin         |   4,727    |    3,233    |    46%    |
| Reunion.com          |   4,323    |    4,348    |    -1%    |
| AOL Community        |   3,337    |    4,641    |   -28%    |
| Flixster             |   2,619    |    1,591    |    65%    |
| Buzznet.com          |   2,526    |    1,332    |    90%    |
+----------------------+------------+-------------+-----------+
Source: Nielsen Online

Myspace.com, although it hasn't received the press coverage recently that Facebook and LinkedIn have, remains at the top, and continues to attempt to innovate with the addition of the Myspace platform, to somewhat mixed reviews. LinkedIn is about ready to overtake Spaces in total unique audience, as Windows Live Spaces continues to underperform, with only troubled AOL (who are at least trying to do something by buying Bebo) losing more in the past 12 months.

Spaces v13 released: Hey Spaces team - blogging, ever hear of it?

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 03:13:00 GMT

News is filtering out that a new version of Spaces has been released, apparently last week, on Valentine's Day (Feb 14). Our friend Dev at Hack MSN Spaces has a partial list of the changes, the most visible being the inclusion of a "Common Friends" box, similar to what's available on Facebook.

Dev lists two other changes - the removal of list descriptions (and changing lists to bold), and a more detailed description for updated Spaces (when you're not signed in). Then in Dev's comments, Mat has a more complete list of the version changes that he's compiled. Unfortunately it's in Italian, so we're forced to fire up Windows Live Translator:

Here the directory of the new modernizations:

The list friendly introduces “friends in municipality”, already present functionality in the Social Networking di Facebook, “Common Friends”.

This new option marks it to us if a Windows Live Spaces has friends that we have in municipality.

The list friendly introduces notes on every single customer in the main page.

Always in the List Friendly, now, there is a better management in Preview Mode: “all” and “invited”.

It lists introduce with the titles them in block letter and in those lateral ones more the visualization of the descriptions of every element is not previewed.

Improved the option for the insertion of a new directory, with the tipologia to choose, tito it and name.
Changed the icona “it incorporates” in the egg whites photographic

Windows Live Bar already introduces icona the MSN from some day.

The visualization of the comments is changed: the address is beside the name and it is not more at the end of the written content.

(Note: "Egg Whites" = "album". Ahhh the joys of translation.)

The Egg whites Photographic modification introduces the new option “module”.

Cliccando on it, will have a page that will concur to personalize the reproduction of the images:

- the title it.

- Speed of reproduction: slow, medium or fast.

- Reproduction of all the egg whites or personalized: possibility to reproduce all our egg whites, or only those chosen ones from the owner.

- To hide the possibility to select egg whites, therefore not to give to way to a visitor the possibility to choose which egg whites to see in the homepage.

- Possibility to order to the sequence of reproduction of our egg whites, dulling the option “selects” and inserting the number in the case “order” beside the egg whites.

From now it is concurred to expose in blog the more photographic egg whites.

The concurred maximum is of six egg whites.

New page assigned for the events that we want to make to see in our profile. http://idblog.spaces.live.com/sharedevents/

Currently this “small” has not been made official null from the official sources care release.

News expects, above all on the service in beta still closed the public Italian: Skydrive (in reality I have published the way in order to approach the service storage from first of September).

It is hypothetical that Skydrive is ready to the official release, from the moment that the option of access in Windows Live Spaces (with Italian interface) is present in the cache of memory of Windows Live Search.

The same speech is worth for the future service Windows Live Groups.

At all it is not excluded that they can be to us other innovationes to short.

Al moment is all and news from the official sources expects.

OK we have no way of actually knowing if this list is complete, or official, since a) our Italian sucks, and b) no one on the Spaces team has bothered to post on their official blog since Dec 20 of last year. Hey guys, you run a blog service! Try blogging once in a while, it's catching on! Sheesh.

Anyway, Mat has some nice screenshots, as does Dev. Check it out.

Traffic Count in Windows Live Spaces: try StatCounter

Sunshine — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 20:57:40 GMT

Over at The UsefulTechnology Blog an article appeared on StatCounter. Besides putting a counter up on a "regular" Website you can also put one up at your Live Space with StatCounter.

To add StatCounter to your Windows Live Space, first register your account at www.StatCounter.com, create a 'project' for your blog, then grab the HTML code for your home page counter by clicking the little spanner icon next to your project. Now click on 'Install Code' and choose a counter style that you like. Hit Next, choose MSN Spaces, then Next again. Now highlight and copy (CTRL+C) the HTML code that's been generated for you.

Now, here's the less well understood part. Go to Windows Live Gallery and install the HTML Sandbox gadget for Windows Live Spaces. Once this gadget is installed on your Spaces homepage, paste in the HTML code that you copied from StatCounter, then remember to save your changes. You can move the HTML Sandbox gadget to wherever you like....

This aroused my curiosity so I decided to give it a go myself too. I found it was indeed quite simple to set up. If you have more than one Website or Blog you can just set up another StatCounter project and manage that one from your account as well. How does StatCounter work:

You can have a visible counter, invisible counter, visible counter on homepage only or a button. For the counter you can even chose between a text one or an image, you can customize to your likings. If during the generation of the install code you tell it to add a "View My Stats" link you can show your visitors the stat logs too. The amount of info collected is quite a bit, it really doesn't stop at just counting! It registers page loads, unique visitors, returning visitors and more... Feel free to have a look at my Live Space's stats, you will find the counter at the bottom right. You can sort on daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly. As long as you don't exceed 9,000 page loads each day the service stays free (log size 500 page loads), if you do you will be asked to remove the code or to upgrade. Prices start at $9/Month for up to 1,500,000 Page loads/Month.

It's also worth adding a 'blocking cookie' to all the computers that you use to view your Windows Live Spaces pages otherwise your visitor stats will be skewed every time you post to your Space. You can get the blocking cookie from the Installation and Configuration page at StatCounter (click the little spanner icon again).

If you only use one computer or know the IP/IP range of the computers used by you to access your Live Space you can also exclude these in the settings of your StatCounter project. I did this as I always delete cookies on exit of the browser.

Customize blog entry backgrounds in Spaces

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 01:44:00 GMT

Our friend Dev Parikh of Hack MSN Spaces (congrats on the MVP award, Dev, well deserved!), along with Little Fish Big Pond, have put together a nice set of backgrounds for individual blog posts that you can download, add in the html, and customize your Spaces on a per post basis.

Quite a nice set of background images, especially if you're into fantasy:

Looks like it's pretty easy: just go to the Hack MSN Spaces SkyDrive folder, choose a background, download the html and insert it into your blog entry, and enjoy. The full set of directions are here.

Just for fun, we created an entry over on our LiveSide Spaces site. Nice work, guys!

All Angus, All the Time: more from our favorite Microsoft Executive, this time on Eye-Fi

Kip Kniskern — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 13:47:00 GMT

Angus Logan, the Senior Technical Product Manager for Windows Live Platform, last year sent out some 30,000 emails. If our inbox is any indication, he's looking to beat that record by a large margin this year. However, and especially since he's known to Wired Magazine as a Microsoft Executive, we don't want to ignore him as it will probably cause him to send us even more email, and we don't know if Windows Live Mail can handle it.

(We're just KIDDING, Angus! Keep the emails coming!)

Anyway Angus' obsession of the moment is Eye-Fi integration with Windows Live Spaces, and in spite of our joking around, it really is pretty cool news. Angus (with some Windows Live help, acknowledged on his blog) worked with Eye-Fi, and using the Windows Live Spaces Photo API, got Eye-Fi working with Spaces:

You can read more on Angus Logan's blog (or just wait for an email from him in your inbox, it shouldn't be long), he's got a great write-up on how the Eye-Fi integration works, and how using it with Windows Live Spaces offers privacy controls some of the other services don't. Check it out!

(See Angus? We're not haters!)

Program to Windows Live Events? The Create Events API

Kip Kniskern — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:00:00 GMT

Rob Dolin, a Program Manager on the Spaces team, posts tonite with an example of a programmatically created Windows Live Event:

API Details
The link should have taken you to an event create page with all of the specified parameters pre-populated. Yep, it’s a long link, but it’s intended to show all of the parameters (most of which are optional.) Here’s the link in a more read-able format:

http://spaces.live.com/api.aspx
?wx_action=createEvent
&wx_targetSite=eventSpace
&wxp_name=Movie+Night:+Live+Free+or+Die+Hard
&wxp_alias=livefreeordiehard
&wxp_contactName=John+Smith
&wxp_contactPhone=206-555-1212
&wxp_location=Space+Needle
&wxp_address=4th+Ave.+and+Broad+St.+in+Seattle
&wxp_latlong=47.62061,-122.34942
&wxp_mapType=h
&wxp_mapZoom=18
&wxp_description=%3cimg%20src='http://entimg.msn.com/i/150/mo/OneSheets/new3/LiveFreeorDieHard.jpg'%3e
&wxp_template=IIEventOscarParty.xml

As you can see, parameters are URL encoded. The mapping parameters (mapType, mapZoom) are consistent with Virtual Earth. Check out their interactive SDK for more info.

Dolin goes on to offer some ideas for potential uses, and a PS on RSS:

RSS
P.S. Publicly accessible events also include an RSS feed. You can see this by adding /feed.rss to the event’s URL AND in additional to basic RSS elements like <title>, <link>, <description>, and <pubDate>; <geo> and <georss> elements are also included.

...read more on the Spaces Developer Platform blog.

With all of the talk about APIs (Application Programming Interface) and Microsoft lately, this is an interesting if not very well publicized development. As of yet there's no mention of this functionality on Dev.live.com or in the Windows Live SDK. Certainly that must be changing soon.

Thanks to ViaWindowsLive for blogrolling this, although unlike Angus we think you should keep on reading LiveSide, too ;)

Windows Live Spaces takes aim at Facebook's News Feed

Harrison Hoffman — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 03:14:00 GMT

Microsoft rolled out a killer feature that we haven't talked about yet in their last Windows Live Spaces update. They are calling it "Windows Live What's New" and it acts as a direct competitor to Facebook's News Feed. I am really glad that they decided to include this feature in the latest release since the News Feed continues to be my absolute favorite feature of Facebook.

What's New gives you information on what you friends are doing in six different areas: blogs, photos, lists, files, friends, and profiles. Unfortunately, at this time, events are not included in the feed, but I would assume that they will be included in a later release once Events is more established.

Something else worth noting is that my current top post on Windows Live Spaces occurred about five minutes ago, while the current top item on my Facebook News Feed occurred around two hours ago. So, it seems that the way that they have Windows Live What's New fetching information is quicker than the way that Facebook is doing it (although this is not confirmed).

If you want to know more about Windows Live What's New, make sure to check out Rob Dolin's (Program Manager for the Spaces Home experience) blog post about it. You can also check out Dare Obasanjo's commentary on WL What's New (he also noticed the speediness of the updates). It's good to see Microsoft and Facebook in some healthy competition, despite all of the acquisition rumors.