MSN Spaces. Oooh. MSN Spaces. Microsoft crashes the 'blog party. Interesting. [eric.weblogs.com]
First impressions:
- It looks pretty good in terms of basic functionality and even some of the themes are reasonable. (I assume it's built on SharePoint).
The wizzy drag and drop layout feature in IE looks great, but there's no save button that I can see, so currently any changes are lost. Workaround: Use Firefox, which results in a simple widget being displayed that does the job and allows you to save.
Update: This appears to be working now in IE. I've not sure what the problem was.
- The security options depend on your users having a .NET passport. It would be good to see a more more flexible system in the next version.
- It looks like sites cannot have multiple authors using the standard interface. (I could be wrong on this one - corrections welcome).
- There is posting via e-mail, which may allow more than one author to post to the site, though this introduces some other issues.
- I would suggest that all tools offering post by e-mail should allow a user to define a simple pair of start and end delimiters, e.g. *start and *end so ads and other appended garbage are not posted to the blog.
The small banner ads do not seem to be working yet (Update: Whoops. That would be one of the hosts file entries that I use to remove ads), but even so there are a number of default links to MSN sites and services which I find intrusive. I accept that the service needs to pay for itself, but having links to the MSN Shopping and Money at the foot of each page looks bad to me. Clearly, there are other options out there for people who are bothered by this.
- IE 5.5+ is needed for playlist harvesting from MS Media Player, and also for adding pictures to the photo albums.
- There are a number of glitches currently, possibly related to server load or PEBKAC, but they look like bugs to me.
Update: These all seems to work now, after I added myself to my own contacts list in Hotmail, granted access for me to the site, and then logged out and logged back into Passport. (It's possible that only the last step was necessary, so try that first).
Drag and drop issue in IE mentioned above
I can't post comments, despite comments being turned on and being logged in to my Passport account.
The theme selector only seems to work in Firefox.
Er, that's it.
8:26:15 AM 
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