Light Side: MSN Spaces

Is Live ... Waking Up?

Sat, 21 Jul 2007 06:30:58 GMT

I haven't been on (Windows) Live Spaces much lately, because it won't work in my Opera browser, which I've switched to on the Mac, and which right now is far better than Safari for most stuff.

Today I took a look and it appears that Microsoft is finally starting to make some changes again. What's better, these changes seem to be visually clean and neat and WORK right the first time! Microsoft, I know you've got it in you to do well on the web (but NOT necessarily to be the 800 pound gorilla of the internet), if you'll just set a course and stick to it, and DO THE LITTLE THINGS RIGHT.

I.E., don't bother chasing someone/everyone else who's doing well on the web. That competitive strategy doesn't work on the internet!

Of course, the problem is, there seems to hardly be anyone left on Live Spaces anymore, even worse than Xanga. My stats for this blog are pitiful, but very unlike my Xanga blog, Spaces doesn't seem to pull any hits in from outside its own community, despite sending out pings.

On the other hand, I just read something about MS investing a lot in server farms, so maybe Live is going to finally happen in some form, even if they've been beaten - bad - in search.

Light Side is starting to look like a nice, clean design again, which makes me want to work on it. Spaces is a work in progress, but probably worth Microsoft's continued investment.

Live Spaces Issues in Various Mac Browsers

Sat, 26 May 2007 04:30:51 GMT

I've been trying a couple of Mac browsers as a replacement for Safari, which works great for a few days but then gets increasingly bloated from memory leaks. Since Safari doesn't have a way to readily save all the open links/windows, you can't just easily quit and restart.

Anyway, I was surprised to discover that in both the browsers I tried, Camino 1.0.4 and Opera 9.2, Windows Live Spaces are automatically redirected to Mobile Spaces, a much simpler rendering of my blog. I guess there's only certain browsers that Spaces even accepts for the normal version.

As a result of Spaces' "rejecting" them, these browsers are completely unacceptable as a way to maintain Light Side. So I guess I'll be using Safari at least to run this blog.

I also tried the User Agent feature under the Debug menu (which you must activate to see in Safari). I was hoping that maybe by using the Windows MSIE 6.0 user agent, that I could fool Spaces into letting me do at least simple things, particularly working with categories, the module for which, as I've noted, don't even show up in Safari.

It worked as far as seeing the Categories module (and display by category) goes, but I wasn't able to add a category. I've been wanting to add one for entrepreneurship, thinking Light Side might be a good place to write more about my experiences and things I've learned in this area, but since I couldn't add a category, an earlier post was simply put under the "About Me" category where I guess I'll be putting any more for the time being.

There's still a lot of things I like about Spaces, but in case Microsoft isn't paying attention, most of their competitors are adding features and capabilities at an ever-accelerating pace. Xanga has really improved a lot in the past year, FaceBook has just announced a major upgrade, MySpace has been buying other companies, and even WordPress is up to v. 2.2 now. Spaces is clearly falling farther and farther behind.

By the way, if you're looking for a good Mac browser, you should definitely check out Opera. Someone wrote that they thought Opera 9.2 was the best Mac browser out there, and I'm pretty impressed myself. Besides automatically saving your current session, it has a lot of nice new features you might not realize you want/need such as fast-forward, "speed-dial" and a trash tab where you can recover accidentally-closed tabs. Of course, it's completely free now, so that's quite a deal. I'll write more about it later in my blog All Things.

Microsoft Needs to Understand the Culture of the Internet

Fri, 04 May 2007 23:31:29 GMT

I started out writing here about the revived Microsoft-Yahoo talks and MS' need to change their culture and strategy, but decided to move the post to my blog All Things. Maybe Microsoft is finally starting to accept that they really don't get the internet. I hope they realize it's not just the technology/business, they don't get the culture of the net, either.

BBC reported a really telling quote by analyst Matt Rosoff, "I do not understand what Yahoo would get out of the deal, including that there are people there who don't want to work for Microsoft."

Microsoft needs to stop making enemies and work harder at making some friends! After 27 years as a Microsoft customer, I still feel like a second-class citizen just because I don't use Windows and IE (actually, I was using IE until they pulled the plug on the Mac version).

My six and half year old daughter came in, and so I tested her reading as I've been prone to do for the last couple of years. I highlighted Microsoft on the screen and asked her to say it ... "mick-ros-oft?" I wouldn't have expected her to know it, but then I highlighted the other name and she says "Ya-hoo", right away ... I suspect MS needs them much more than the other way around.

Spaces is Sort of Working Again

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 02:06:41 GMT

Well, I'm nearly done with another post, and as you can see from the increased posting frequency, I've more or less finally gotten over all the problems arising from last year's transition from MSN Spaces to Live Spaces. On the other hand, this certainly doesn't mean everything is working great, at least on my Mac (running the latest Mac OS, 10.4.8, BTW).

I have to click on a post before I see the archives, which then appear on the left. Categories may work if you know how to put together the URL, but I can't get the list to appear anywhere on my Light Side pages (at least with my Mac/Safari), which is a major annoyance, and a post's particular category isn't displayed. I've been meaning to get on a PC and check this out. I wonder if it's fine with Firefox or only (I assume) Explorer.

I still don't like the appearance, which can't be changed from a Mac using Safari (guess I need to finally try Firefox soon), though it doesn't bother me as much as it used to. Mostly I'm just wondering how long it will be until Microsoft "tears up the street" again. Maybe it will be a while, because they really don't seem to be paying much attention to Spaces right now.

That's both good and bad, in that when they leave Spaces alone for a while, I tend to get back in a rhythm of posting every so often. On the other hand, it just makes me further convinced that even a decade or more after MS supposedly finally got the internet "religion", they really still don't have that much commitment to it, or even really understand it.

The net is the inverse of a carefully controlled ecosystem like Windows, and the unwelcome message it keeps sending is that they need to tear up their old business model and get a new one. I wonder if Microsoft will follow in the footsteps of so many other top companies and fail to listen in time.

As I noted at the beginning, I appreciate Microsoft's providing Spaces to us for free, even if it's not quite as likable as it was a year ago. I do wish, though, that MS would be at least a little less paranoid about embracing the Mac, and also get out and go talk to real people and make a serious effort to finally understand what the net is all about!

Creative Destruction ...

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 04:37:08 GMT

Whenever Microsoft starts messing with Spaces again, I just kind of back off for a while until things settle down again. Well, that's the idea, anyway. Unfortunately it seems like they're incapable of making an update that doesn't first wreck the look of my blog ... perhaps it looks better on the latest version of Explorer.

Last time, earlier this year when the Live Contact functions were being added, after a month or two with some changes on my part and some intervention from support, most of it was OK again. It would be nice if they'd tell us WHAT the whole Live! thing is about. Even stock analysts last week were criticizing Microsoft for not making this clearer.

Of course, as best I can tell, MS is usually frantically trying to make it up as they go along, so who knows what Live! is really aimed at accomplishing, though they could do a better job with PR. So far, to me Live! is simply the stuff that keeps breaking my blog!

Well, Schumpeter said you had to have some creative destruction in order to innovate and make progress. It's frustrating, though, that MS never seems to grasp the concept of putting together a good foundation and then building on it in such a way that you don't keep messing things up. On the other hand, while as different from Microsoft as night and day in this regard, even Apple keeps pulling the rug out from under its users, so maybe it's just to be expected.

In any case, right now I can't seem to modify the basic theme for my space. I liked the old one a lot, and while this one isn't so bad, the scaling keeps getting worse every time they update, and I'm not that happy about the font either. I think they've added all the white space to make it look more like MySpace, but they're probably wasting their time competing that way. As I noted before, each blogging site would do best to come up with their own niche, and to me, anyway, MySpace seems rather distasteful and unappealing.

Worst of all, however, while preview entry works, every time I save it as a draft it removes all the tags. I'm going to put them back in but don't know what will happen when I publish it.

I guess if it's all crammed together, I'll have to contact support. Hmmm ... are we to version 3 of Spaces yet?

Changes to MSN, Spaces

Mon, 06 Mar 2006 03:47:41 GMT

I'm still having trouble with my profile, as you can probably see at left. I've sent another support request. I told them I know they've got my square photo that I uploaded, because it shows up on my contact card. For some reason it just won't show up on my profile.

The new photos are really too small. I guess that's been done to integrate with Live Contact, but it's a poor compromise. As far as I can tell, Live Contact in general is still pretty half-baked, but apparently is some big Microsoft corporate marketing push. That's the dark side of MS, trying to push stuff on users when they haven't really even got it working right.

As a Mac (and Office) user, it's important to me that things just work, but Microsoft has never had that philosophy. Spaces had a lot of bugs at first, but they got it right after a while, but why is it so hard for software companies to keep their software running right??!!

After many frustrations, I developed a rule of thumb with the web that if something got hard, I would just give up on it, because usually a lot of extra effort didn't help. Nevertheless, I spent more than an hour today trying to fix the profile and on other tweaks, with little success.

I did add the blog list feature. Putting blogrolls on my blogs was one of the things I was aiming to do this year, but I'm a little hesitant about it. Most people seem to like to be listed, but I wonder if some don't. I guess I'll start adding blogs soon.

It seems like there are a lot of changes at MSN and Spaces, new MSN leadership and new Spaces features. I hope Microsoft still values MSN Spaces, because it seems like one of the best things they've done in a while. Considering that Rupert Murdoch paid a lot of $$ for MySpace, surely Spaces is worth something, too.

I checked out MySpace briefly a while back, but it really isn't my cup of tea. I like Xanga, which I wrote about recently in my blog All Things, but as I noted, there's still a lot of opportunity for Spaces, Xanga, FaceBook and others like MySpace if they each find their own niche.

Spaces seems to have had a nice balance of power and simplicity. It supports RSS, for example, but is pretty straightforward. I'm curious how some people have managed to customize their spaces so much.

Hopefully Microsoft will stay the course with Spaces, fix the recent bugs and let it keep growing. As far as I can tell, Spaces is growing well, if not spectacularly. I suspect that a lot of the folks here will be less likely to jump to the latest fad site, whatever it is that comes after MySpace.

More MSN Spaces Issues

Sat, 04 Feb 2006 23:18:18 GMT

OK, I thought I'd try editing my profile to see if once it was saved again, everything would be fine, but there's a lot of changes, it seems, on the profile edit page. First, it says I should use a square picture. I guess that explains the distortion, but not why the picture is smaller.

I almost didn't think this was worth writing about yesterday, but now my profile also has the text spilling out the side, and other problems. The default page size for my space seems bigger (so it hogs a bigger window, at least it seems), and my location info is gone. Apparently Microsoft has integrated Live Contact (which it notes on the profile edit page is in beta) into the MSN Profile.

In any case, Microsoft apparently made some major changes to MSN Spaces just recently, and they aren't working well for me so far. I'm using Safari 1.0 on Mac OS 10.2. I'm just about to move to Safari 2 and 10.4, but don't know if that will make any difference or not.

I had been pleased how Spaces worked well with Safari, even though I'd read about problems with other browsers. In fact, I'd noted how (ironically) Spaces looked better in Apple's Safari browser than it did in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 5.2 (6 isn't available on the Mac).

While I could try to do some things on the profile edit page, obviously Spaces has some problems to fix, so it's probably pointless to bother with right now. There also may be a security issue. They're asking for a lot more info now, which I'm not about to enter, since my profile page is now showing my last name, which I don't think it did before (i.e. who knows what info it would display even if you told it not to).

I've really liked MSN Spaces, because it's simple but not too basic, and pretty usable even on a Mac (though some issues remain, such as with photos). It's nice for Microsoft to provide this for free, especially since the ads are limited and mostly tasteful, so I'll be patient. But I hope it'll be right, when they're done with it.

Profile Picture Problem

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 23:45:55 GMT

MSN Spaces was apparently down for a while this afternoon. Several times I got a server runtime error, and now that Spaces is up again my profile photo doesn't look so good. It's been reduced in size and looks kind of distorted, maybe that's a scaling effect. I hope they're going to put it back to normal size when all their servers are fixed.

Sign-In Problems

Fri, 23 Dec 2005 16:54:56 GMT

I don't know if it's just me, but a lot of times lately when I try to sign into MSN Spaces, it rejects my password even when it's right. I guess MSN must be pretty busy over the holiday season. Sometimes it helps to try pulling up a different page (e.g. the blog public home) and signing in from there rather than keep trying from the same page.

I've learned with the internet that everything degrades around holiday time, and it can be the worst at the end of a holiday weekend when you can just tell a lot of the ISP's routers are on the blink and there's no one there to fix them. My ISP is actually pretty good with great support the rest of the time though, so I can't really complain.

Alternative Updated Spaces Listing

Mon, 25 Jul 2005 04:35:43 GMT

I just ran across an interesting alternative listing of updated MSN Spaces by Eric Swanson. It gives a lot more information about each space and what has been updated. I have no idea how it works but I'm impressed with how fast it loads!

Can't Add Photo Album

Sun, 17 Jul 2005 01:32:15 GMT

According to MSN Spaces help, you're to use IE 6 to create a photo album. At least, they don't suggest any other ways. I've tried Safari 1.0 and IE 5.2.1 with no success. Actually, my space looks kind of bad in IE 5.2 (though fine in Safari).

So I'm wondering if there are any Mac users out there who've found a way to add a photo album to their space, maybe with Firefox(?) or something (there is no IE 6 for Mac). I wonder if this is just a way for MS to segment their users and limit non-Windows users to text (which doesn't count against the 30MB storage limit). Just out of curiousity, are their any Linux users who have solved this?

Other than this, Spaces seems like a pretty good site. Simple but effective. Maybe I can at least add photos to blog entries. I'll try that in a minute.