MSN Spaces reviewed

December 2, 2004 | By Duncan | Filed Under General

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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Comments

24 Responses to “MSN Spaces reviewed”

  1. Business Intelligence Blog - Blog Herald Rating for MSN Space Blog: 0.5/10 on December 2nd, 2004 7:18 pm

    [...] DefintLink   Business Intelligence Blog Blogging Intelligence Is Power Blog Herald Rating for MSN Space Blog: 0.5/10 [...]

  2. Sallie on December 2nd, 2004 8:48 pm

    YOU have out-done yourself today! Every post is enlightening and….well, “spit my coffee at the screen” funny! Thanks as always for being. :-)

  3. WOLves on December 2nd, 2004 10:08 pm

    Early Review of MSN Spaces
    I look at bloghosts from a different point of view than most. Since I’m not a tech, I’m looking at it from the perspective of somebody that is perhaps just starting out, but has the same needs as most business users. They want to blog without worry…

  4. Jim Elve on December 3rd, 2004 2:51 am

    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.

  5. Business Intelligence Blog on December 3rd, 2004 3:18 am

    Blog Herald Rating for MSN Space Blog: 0.5/10
    MSN launched MSN Spaces, its new blogging service. The MSN Spaces beta version is a free service available in 14 languages and 26 markets worldwide.
    Before to read other news about MSN Spaces Blog, it’s better to read Blog Herald News.

  6. Professional-Lurker: Comments by an academic in cyberspace on December 3rd, 2004 8:06 am

    MSN Spaces blogging site - not a good first day
    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>…

  7. Rick Abbott dot net Blog on December 3rd, 2004 9:14 am


    MSN released their new (and hopefully only) blogging service yesterday

    Amid server shutdowns and errors, the service had a bumpy start. I, being the curious type, tried to start one of my own, only to see what it was like. But i was suprised at find…

  8. Tech-Knowledge on December 4th, 2004 6:12 am

    MSN Spaces reviews
    Trudy Schuett’s blog for writers has a good review of the new MSN spaces. So does the Blog Herald. And here’s my NBC-TV video review they’lll send out to the affiliates next week….

  9. Sgtret on December 5th, 2004 1:57 pm

    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.

  10. Bene Diction Blogs On on December 5th, 2004 9:53 pm

    Blog traffic down
    Blog traffic is down since the US elections. Blog traffic is up since January. This is a completely US-centric analysis and an interesting one. Anyone that read blogs prior to the US elections would have said that hits-traffic would be down after the e…

  11. Anonymous on December 6th, 2004 5:00 am


    Mixed reviews

  12. ashley on January 20th, 2005 4:52 am

    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

  13. costa wladimir on February 3rd, 2005 12:41 am

    hi all my from u.s.a. atlanta ga

  14. Cody M on April 8th, 2005 5:58 pm

    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

  15. Wolf Flame on April 12th, 2005 11:31 pm

    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.

  16. mike on June 12th, 2005 7:01 am

    i use msn spaces!

  17. Tina on June 13th, 2005 7:12 pm

    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.

  18. » The demise of the geek bloggers The Blog Herald: more blog news more often on August 21st, 2005 11:53 pm

    [...] or even credit of Mike Torres) Spaces works, and despite the initial limitations on launch I’d noted at the time Microsoft once again displayed an amazing ability to get in [...]

  19. jennifer on October 25th, 2005 2:51 pm

    msn space is cool because it’s fun for everyone.
    lol, jennifer l. white

  20. David on November 3rd, 2005 9:58 am

    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

  21. Petr on January 20th, 2006 3:17 am

    Hi! Who knows still sites similar to this?

  22. gama on May 16th, 2006 12:12 am

    gama

    The gama Directory consists of 41 categories and 1,400 subcategories specific to gama.

  23. Brad Jasper's Blog on May 23rd, 2006 2:23 am

    MSN Spaces

    Yesterday, Microsoft came out with MSN Spaces, their version of Blogger, LiveJournal, etc..
    I was going to write a quick review, but in all honesty, a few people have summed up what I was going to say.
    * Scoble: MSN Spaces isn’t the blogging serv…

  24. gaming on May 24th, 2006 1:30 pm

    gaming

    Thank you for your interest in gaming you are doing a wonderful thing for your community! So that is what was doing that on gaming. I noticed it about a month ago but so much crap was installed on it from other students. Its really annoying and pissed …

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