Talking about Spaces updates!

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 21:59:27 GMT

Some updates to spaces available today! Here are some details below from my (Mike's) blog.

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Talking about Spaces updates!

Lots of updates to Spaces today; some of them are immediately apparent (i.e. support for additional modules, some usability fixes for photos, and another new URL structure) while a lot of them may not be. Here are some thoughts on this release:

Photo album usability improvements. From the Spacecraft writeup: "We listened to your feedback and have brought back the list of all your photo albums on the home page.When you edit your Space, you can use this list to re-order your albums: Just click on the up or down arrow that displays when you hover your mouse over the album title in the list box." I have to admit, I'm not the world's biggest fan of the new album picker, but it's a LOT better than what we had. Rest assured that we're going to continue making improvements as we approach the Windows Live release.
New modules and support for the Microsoft Gadget Framework. This is a MUCH bigger deal that it seems at first glance, but the short of it is that we now support gadgets in Spaces. Right now the gadgets are limited to the ones we have "approved" like weather, stock quotes, quote of the day, and the updated spaces map... but supporting the gadget platform is a HUGE step in the right direction for spaces to become more flexible, more customizable, and more FUN. Look for a LOT of coolness around this in the coming months.
IE7 Beta 2 bug fixes. We've done everything we can to squash these for all of you.
New URL. Again, not the biggest fan of this but it's something we absolutely had to do to continue to grow the service. Greg spoke about these changes here. And I'm actually starting to like it - the URLs look a little cleaner - despite months of complaining to Greg about this ;)
Potential Bloglines fix. See bug details here. We think we nipped this one too finally - please let me know if you are still seeing random unread blog entries in Bloglines (except for the ones from today; those were due to the changes to our URL)

Behind those user-facing changes, the most significant work done in this release, bar none, is our move to multiple data centers (and a bunch of performance related work) to support future growth and speedy page loads for the service. Supporting 100 million users a month is exhausting for those servers - so we've given them a bit of a break. This is some serious infrastructure work that we will be reaping the benefits of for years to come. You should see immediate performance improvements starting now.

Onward to Windows Live Spaces. For those asking about it, there is no need to continue to do so - it's soon. We said it would arrive this summer and we're still on track for that. Remember, the summer is (I think) from June 21st to September 22nd or so. So keep your eyes peeled.

Read more about this release on the Spacecraft blog.

Looking forward to Montage view :)

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 14:02:26 GMT

Hi everyone! Thanks for all your comments and interest. We really enjoy hearing from you. :)

As we've previously posted, we wrote Share Your Story: Blogging with MSN Spaces based on beta software, which means several of the features were in development while we were writing about them. (It's really fascinating, btw, to be able to see software go through various stages of development--but it's also a bit like trying to capture and describe a moving target!)

One of the features we wrote about that is still on the horizon is Montage view. On pages 73-74 and 79-81, I talked about different ways to view the photos you add to your space--and Montage view is a really cool feature that lets you view small thumbnails of your images and then "pop out" a selected photo by positioning the mouse pointer on it. I had a blast working with this while I was writing about it. On your space (or any space, for that matter) if you click the Views control (the down triangle on the right side of the photo album below the options), you'll currently see two view choices: Slideshow and Full view. This is where you'll find the Montage view choice when it's available. Very cool feature--and worth waiting for, I think.

[One other note: I'm curious--are you using the Description and Add a comment items for individual photos in your photo albums? I thought these features would get a lot of use, but so far, I don't notice a lot of people using them. Would having some examples help? Just let us know. :) Kathy]

MSN Spaces Book: Updates

Talking about Spaces updates!

Looking forward to Montage view :)