MSN Spaces

Microsoft have has quietly unveiled a beta of their new blogging service, MSN Spaces. Missing an opportunity to copy Google with their ‘invite-only’ beta, this service is open to everyone, and is disgustingly easy to sign up for. So, I did.

It became clear very quickly that they didn’t make this service for the likes of me. This is not a criticism; people like me are already well-catered for, with the likes of WordPress, MovableType and Textpattern et al, and our fetish for pastels, and illegibly pale text on white backgrounds. Nor is it aimed at the Livejournal market; it eschews almost all sense of community with the exception of ‘new spaces’ and ‘updated spaces’ lists to encourage cross-pollination. Its closest natural rival is, I would think, Google’s Blogger; after all, now that Google and Microsoft are competing on both email and searches, it’s natural that Microsoft would like a bit of this blogging action as well. Microsoft’s new found faith in blogging has been well-publicised lately with various corporate blogs, such as Internet Explorer development (sic), and the Channel9 Forums.

That said, they’re still not that comparable, because MSN Spaces offers a lot more than Blogger does. Blogger is very simplistic, which again, is not a criticism; simple is what Google tends to excel at. What you have with Blogger is the ability to blog, and that’s about it — it doesn’t even provide you with hosting for your pictures. MSN Spaces appears to have been built after a team of executives scoured the internet and wrote down a list of the most common things people do on their websites, then implemented those features. Post photos, post blog entries, and post lists of music and books.

As I said before, Microsoft didn’t make this service for the likes of me, so we can forget about well-formed and valid HTML and CSS, we can forget about neat URIs and attractive templates, we can forget about customisation and flexibility. This is a service for people who do things the way Microsoft want them to; those who use the latest Windows Media Player for organising and listening to their music, those who use MSN Messenger and all its features, those who exclusively use Internet Explorer (and so do all their friends and family), those who use Windows XP and who use the Stationery in Outlook Express.

That is, I admit, quite a lot of people.

Solyent Green is people.

While Blogger offers a range of templates designed by such CSS luminaries as Zeldman, Cederholm, Shea, Bowman and Glish, MSN Spaces offers some eye-wateringly bright and garish colour alternatives that change the colour scheme and the background image (either a repeating tile, or a non-repeating photo). There’s nothing here that’s going to win any design awards, and it all looks just like everything else Microsoft has produced recently; boxes with coloured tips and rounded corners at the top, reminiscent of sites built with the execrable PostNuke. As far as customisation of the template goes, there is none; you can’t edit the colours or fonts yourself, you’re limited to what Microsoft provide you with — more restrictive than Blogger which permits you to edit the HTML. This will, I’m sure, be of no interest whatsoever to the target market.

Again like PostNuke, MSN Spaces divides its content into blocks. While PostNuke allowed you to rearrange these blocks via a painstaking process involving the user clicking ‘up’ or ‘down’ links, and moving any particular block one click at a time, MSN Spaces has a nice drag and drop system (as with most of its best features, this is Internet Explorer only). This allows you to just grab hold of the titlebar of any block, and move it around to where you want it. It’s a system that works very well, much like rearranging icons in Windows Explorer, or on the Windows Desktop. You can also select from one of 5 frame-like layouts, but I found that switching between these often gave me cause to rearrange my blocks again.

Adding a blog entry is simple enough; you write the title, select a category (if you want to) then write the post. A basic WYSIWYG editor is there, allowing the usual suspects; bold, italic, underline, left-, right-, and full-justify, ordered and unordered lists, indent and outdent, link, text colour, and (whisper it) emoticons. Blogger has a similar post editor (though it’s not the default setting), but one that also allows you to change the font and text size as well.

So far as I could tell, any HTML you enter yourself is rendered as text, but again, I can’t see most users needing to do this anyway. Trackbacks are also implemented (a strange omission from Blogger).

When you return to the front page, you can see that permalinks are also present, but Microsoft have chosen to hide them behind a pointless sliver of JavaScript; click the word ‘permalink’ and you open a box that tells you what the permalink is. It reveals how ugly the URIs of MSN Spaces are:

http://spaces.msn.com/members/joeblade/Blog/cns!1pUjOs1giye-ZUuXQn7G–IA!132.entry

Mmm. They get worse:

http://spaces.msn.com/members/joeblade/PersonalSpace.aspx?_c11_MusicList_ListID=cns!1pUjOs1giye-ZUuXQn7G–IA!107&_c=MusicList

Is your wife a sport, eh?

Each MSN Space gets 10mb of storage for photos. After downloading a plugin for Internet Explorer, you can easily upload images by browsing for wherever you keep them and selecting them. These photos are displayed on your Space’s front page, displayed in a perpetual loop if you’re viewing in Internet Explorer, with links to the full-size photo album as well. It’s an online photo album. What more can I say? It works well enough, lets you scroll through an album, and when you upload the images you can select to rotate them and do various other things to them. Again, it’s all very simple, and I have no qualms with it, though I’m glad that as an Opera user, I don’t get to see the distracting fading slideshow on the front page.

Of lists and music.

MSN Spaces loves its lists, it even has ‘Lists’ as a navigation option. This function allows you to make lists. There are two different sorts of list; Book List, and Custom. The former allows you to create a list of books. The latter allows you to create a list of anything else. Fun! With the Book List, you input a title, author, a URL, and a description, and then you can add another. The end result is a list of books. With the Custom List, you have a space for a name, a URL, and a description. The end result is a list of things. Links to sites that are ‘hot’, perhaps, or, I don’t know, favourite cheeses.

Not listed with the other Lists is the Music list. The Music function allows you to create lists of songs, or to import playlists from Windows Media Player. The end result of this is (again) a list of music, this time with each entry linked to the MSN Music Store, so you can not only look at people’s lists, but you can go and buy the music as well, all nicely encumbered with plenty of Digital Rights Management rubbish. A more useful feature is that you can stream the music instead, which still costs, but only costs about a penny per song — useful if you want to know what a band is like before you splash out on a CD (though the Apple iTunes Music Store gives you 30-second previews for free).

Mobile tedium, and other features.

Mobile publishing comes as standard with MSN Spaces. I can’t test this feature, but it looks straightforward enough, and allows you to publish photos and posts from your mobile phone. With cameras coming as standard on mobile phones these days, we can expect to see a lot more of this (Nokia is already there with its Lifeblog service). I can see this feature being popular, particularly if people start drunkenly posting topless pictures of themselves.

Tying MSN Spaces in with MSN Messenger is a permissions section, which lets you make your blog public, or to limit it to only those who are on your MSN Messenger Allowed list, or to only selected people from your MSN Address Book. Finally, a statistics section lets you see a small range of stats for your blog, to give you an idea as to how popular your blog is.

Your own rights management.

MSN Spaces comes with typical Microsoft Terms & Conditions, though I admit that Google is not much better in this regard. This is from the MSN Spaces T&C:

“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. Microsoft may remove your Submission at any time.”

Mmm.

“For each Submission, you represent that you have all rights necessary for you to make the grants in this section. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Microsoft may monitor your e-mail, or other electronic communications and may disclose such information in the event it has a good faith reason to believe it is necessary for purposes of ensuring your compliance with this Agreement, and protecting the rights, property, and interests of the Microsoft Parties or any customer of a Microsoft Party.”

Will anybody bother to read the Terms & Conditions before posting? Doubtful — I know I don’t. Will Microsoft ever actually take advantage of these conditions being agreed to? Probably not — but you never know.

And finally.

So, MSN Spaces. They’re not ugly — not Netscape ugly — but they all look basically the same. They offer no subtlety, no grace, and very little in the way of customisation — just near-identical blogs with near-identical feature sets, stamped out on a production line. I’ve seen several reviews criticising this, but I don’t see it as a problem. Like Livejournal before it, I see MSN Spaces offering a valuable function — hoovering up a significant proportion of crap from the web, and sticking it all in an easily-avoidable area.

What it sets out to do, it does very well and it’s easy to use. Provided you only want to post blog entries, photos, and lists, and aren’t that bothered by its looks, then you’ll no doubt be very happy with it.

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