It seems MSN really stuck their foot into it with the release of Spaces blogging site. Lots of tech problems yesterday, the first day of operation. The Blog Herald talkes about the new site with MSN Spaces reviewed.

Duncan Riley> This review started nearly 10 hours ago when MSN Spaces first went live, and its taken this long to complete due to the continual downtime of the site. It was originally going to be longer and in more depth, but I’d didn’t have all day and night. But I’ll try not to be biased in the review

After eventually getting through the timeouts, errors and 2 .NET accounts I finally progressed past the sign up and to the choice of two options, customise or “go to your space". I picked go to your space and was presented with the layout and editing options, similar to some Wordpress templates available

Content seems to be divided by blog, photos, “lists” and music, with a main composite page of all four.

Settings allow fairly simple choices: a tag line for the blog, how many posts, categories etc.. what is interesting is that the ability to receive trackbacks to post is set by default to other MSN Space blogs only and user intervention is required to open this setting to all. Much to Dave’s horror the ping to weblogs.com is all set at standard. In one positive the ability to email from a mobile phone is offered as a standard feature.

Customisation is limited to 15 rather boring templates with no ability to provide custom layout or CSS

Adding a blog entry is through a simple WYSIWYG interface.

Other features of the site include profile boxes and updated sites, none of which can be removed and in the case of profiles requires handing over more information to Microsoft.

Whilst some are saying that Microsoft will help grow the market, which is possible, this service will do little to provide the current and future bloggers with anything other mass produced, standardised rubbish which can be found at our test site http://spaces.msn.com/members/blogherald/
Rating 0.5/10

Check out the actual post for screen shots.

BoingBoing: A directory of wonderful things posted the following

MSN Spaces = soylent green Updated. Today, Microsoft launches their free hosted blogging platform, spaces.msn.com. What effect the service will have on Blogger, TypePad, Userland, and the like is, predictably, a subject of great debate. The service is free, and seems aimed squarely at home users. BoingBoing reader alfie checks the W3 validator site and says, "MSN Spaces seems to be completely ignoring markup standards. Well done chaps." Link. Reader Christopher Carfi hosts a discussion about the launch on his blog, here.

Reader Paul Pellerito says, "MSN Spaces User asciident notes that at the bottom of every MSN Space is (c)2004 Microsoft Corporation. And according to their terms of use:

For materials you post or otherwise provide to Microsoft related to the MSN Web Sites (a "Submission"), you grant Microsoft permission to (1) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission, each in connection with the MSN Web Sites, and (2) sublicense these rights, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law. Microsoft will not pay you for your Submission."

"Makes me wanna yell STOP! Soylent green is people!"

Think I will personally stick with Movable Type. This way I own my posts. *w* A very good thing in my book.

Posted by prolurkr at December 2, 2004 07:06 PM

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