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
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YOU have out-done yourself today! Every post is enlightening and….well, “spit my coffee at the screen” funny! Thanks as always for being. :-)
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I signed up for a test account this morning. That wasn’t as horrible for me as you but the site was moving much too slowly and I encountered error pages from time to time. What I didn’t like was the lack of access to the css. I also put a fairly empty page through the w3c html validator and got 239 code errors. Not good. I didn’t see any way to use one’s own domain name with the service and that makes for some very unweildy URL’s. The whole thing looks too tightly integrated with MSN. The undeletable menu with a link to MSN Shopping, etc. is irritating and won’t play well with most bloggers. On the plus side, the use of modular components to build the site is a good feature for technophobes.
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Expecting a horror story based on your hastily written “review,” I popped over to MSN Spaces and had a blog up and running in a few minutes.
With a little help form W::Blogger in formatting the HTML, I was able to change the font, add links and photos to the body. That’s the good news. The bad news is I had to use w::Bloggar to do that because there is no HTML formatting tool bar. So far Blogger.com has nothing to worry about.
Too Much Too Late, the motto of MS, of late.
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u see i don believe in gossip u see i have a problem girls at work are giving me a hard time and well i would like some advice before i say something bad
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hi all my from u.s.a. atlanta ga
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I think the msn spaces is great .you can move the recently updated spaces…someone in this review said u couldnt.i did. go check out my space and look what i did with it.I think youll find mine a lil different. you can access my space by clicking thadose.com look at it and leave your feedback on my guestbook thanks
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Alot of run time errors It is sickening. I try and update my space and all I get is a run time error it was great when i was doing it then this keeps happening.
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i use msn spaces!
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MSN Spaces is entirely suiting my purpose. Having moves overseas a few years ago, and now into the deep country there, it can get difficult to keep in touch with my old friends and family. The Spaces diary fills the gap: even if your life is generally too busy at the “convenient time” for overseas contacts, all I need is 30min (or less) a day to keep them up to date with what’s happening here!
MSN Spaces is simple to use, the photo upload function is great and the background and colour themes make the diary look like a nice website.
PS: I haven’t had site errors yet, and despit dial-up the site is fairly fast. Seems they fixed the initial bugs pretty well.
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msn space is cool because it’s fun for everyone.
lol, jennifer l. white
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Blogging
To day i had a look at some other blogging sites to see what other features exist. Msn spaces are still currently my favorite but i have listed some of there min competition along with a few of there defining features.
Blogger.com
Easy to use
Proffesional looking templates
Search listing on googles web blogg search
Weblogs.com intergration – a popular blog update notification service
A free imaging application (picassa?) is needed to upload images :)
Email notifications can be sent when a comment is added
Closly intergrated with other google products
Powerfall customization tools
Add new blogs via email
Xanga.com
200mb photo storage!
Optional blogging tweaks such as a spel checker
Find Nearby Friends with a browse by location feature
Blog rings of similar interest.
TypePad.com
Paypal Tip jar! – Recive tips from readers
Basic membership from $4.95 per month :(
LiveJournal.com
No advertisements!
ScrapBook photo storage
Voting polls – Msn’s missing feature
Basic image and photo editing – resize/flip/rotate
Built by the people for the people. Big up Open source!..
Powerful customization wizard and templates
Communities and local user search
Many amature looking spaces?
Still no advertisements!
http://spaces.msn.com/members/david-passport/Blog/cns!1p4YYliaWMXEO6BedJ9GL-6Q!259.entry
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Hi! Who knows still sites similar to this?