Author: Rick Hallihan

I’ve decided to use my MSN Space as a link blog.

View it here.

I always get it wrong, but it’s fun to guess just the same.

In Robert Scoble’s 12-5 “Sunday Notes” post, he makes an ambiguous reference to an interview he did with a Microsoft Team that he “can’t talk about” but that he hopes will deliver something by Christmas…

So my official guess is that it’ll be an MSN branded web-based RSS aggregator. How else is the typical Spaces user supposed to keep track of all their friends?

Ok, it’s been a few days, and I’ve got a few more thoughts and suggestions for the MSN Spaces team.

Import/Export on Blog Lists – It would be great if you would let me import and export blog lists as OPML, or even better, just let me point to an external OPML file and show the content in my space. Take this a step further, and let me point my “Blog” section to an external blog, and let me point my “Photos” to an external PhotoBlog. Consume the XML, format, and spit it back out. (I know it’s not quite _that_ simple, but it’s close…)

Copy/Paste – Copying a simple post from my normal blog into Spaces was painful. I had to manually copy paste urls and use the button to create links. It’d be great if the richtext editor could recognize and properly format some basic html.

Clear up that TOU, and Fast! – Michael Connolly tries to make it clear that rights on a user’s posts are not forfeited to Microsoft. The language of the TOU does not make this clear, and the FUD is flying through the blogosphere. The Spaces team is handling this pretty well, kudos for that, but the FUD is echoing…

Well, the first day saw slowdowns, error pages, many new “spaces”, complaints and praise.

Robert Scoble has been rounding up feedback.

I think the most significant part of this whole announcement is the fact that this service is not targetted at current bloggers.

It appears that Microsoft’s stated goal here is to bring the benefits of blogging (RSS, Pub/Sub model, Info sharing, Info Searching) to the masses, yet make it as simple to use as email or IM.

Here’s my wishlist:

Semi-WYSIWYG Spaces editor built in to MSN Messenger – Let me drag-drop pictures, audio, video & text, and integrate spelling & grammer checking.

Enclosures – I’m guessing you’re working on it. Again, integrate into Messenger. Maybe even give me a “record audio/video post” function. Focus on simplicity, Limit the number of clicks-to-publish.

Implement Categories – Then let me restrict access based on category.

RSS Feed Security – I know this one will take a while, but somehow figure out how to implement access restrictions on feeds. This may mean extending RSS a bit (I know MSFT has caught flak for the whole “embrace-extend” thing in the past, but RSS is supposed to be extensible!)

Customizable Themes – Background image uploads, color tweaking, etc.

Keep up the good work! V1 looks great!

In an announcement everyone was expecting, MSN Spaces went live today.

Scoble points to several reactions.

Scoble also lay’s out why it’s not going to get him to switch from UserLand.

I’m signing up to play with it, but I’ll echo Scoble’s comment # 2: If I can’t use my own (existing) domain, then I’m not going to migrate.

With that said, this new service might be the unified environment that brings blogging to the masses. We’ll just have to wait and see how well the marketing machine handles this one. A lot of us bloggers are echoing “yaawwwnnn”-like reactions, but remember, this may be the first blogging service that many internet users even consider using.

Now if only there was a smart client that would integrate with Spaces… I’m thinking something like: Right-click in Explorer -> Share Picture on MSN Spaces. now that’d be cool…