MSN Spaces…MSN Groups vNext?
Dare is leading a great conversation about MSN Spaces, Microsoft’s entry into the blog hosting world.
TDavid says: I’m starting to lose interest in MSN Spaces as a blogging tool.
I agree with Dare in that with that comment, right there, too many people are missing the point. Spaces isn’t meant as a straight up competitor to TypePad, Blogger, or WordPress (note, I in no way work on or with the MSN Spaces team, so this is just my uneducated nonsense).
I view MSN Spaces more accurately as the next evolution of MSN Groups, just with RSS feeds, interactivity, and some light blogging ability layered on top.
MSN is aiming squarely for the mom and pop Internet user, who’s looking to do a bit more sharing than in the past. It’s far more LiveJournal than Movable Type. I agree with other bloggers in that I just don’t hear that much about Spaces anymore, after the initial big launch. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a success – it’s just that, I would venture to guess, the typical Spaces “blogger†is blogging for a small circle of friends and family.
That said, I do find it a bit odd that MSN Spaces blogs rarely come up in my PubSub searches – like my very broad one on “students AND bloggingâ€, which brings in hundreds of junk posts (and a few cool ones) each day. Huge amounts of LJ, but eerie silence from Spaces users, which is counter to what I expected. I wonder if that is a function of how PubSub searches, or it does reflect the relative lack of students blogging (and ID’ing themselves as students) on Spaces?
[3/26: updated with a permalink to TDavid's original post, as he noted I left that out]
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You wrote: “MSN Spaces blogs rarely come up in my PubSub searches”…
The problem is that a large percentage of Spaces are non-English but your query is all English words. Searches like yours will generate many fewer results on Spaces than they would on a more predominantly English-language system like LiveJournal, Blogger or Typepad. Remember, Spaces got started in Japan and Asia. It is still gaining momentum in the English-speaking world.
bob wyman
That is a great point – it’s easy to get hung up on an English language view of the web sometimes, and Spaces did first come alive in Japanese. Thanks!
Missing the point, eh? Did you read the rest of my original post? Dare’s link is going 404 and unfortunately you just ripped out one quote and didn’t attribute that quote with any sort of linkage so readers could draw their own conclusions.
Not sure if you know, but features were suggested at launch time like maybe having the ability to use your own domains and MSN Spaces as the backend. When I read this I went and registered domains to correspond to my space and since this functionality hasn’t yet come, those domains are collecting virtual dust. Also, Mike Torres agreed that some of these features need to arrive (though he wouldn’t say which ones).
And lastly I wouldn’t compare Blogger and Typepad which are mostly third party hosted (though you can host a blogger account from your own domain) to Wordpress which requires running on a php/MySQL server. Apples, oranges and the pear which is MSN Spaces.
I just updated the original post with a link directly to your comments TDavid, so everyone can get the proper context.
In terms of apple, oranges, and pears: Thinking in terms of their goal vs. their functionality, I would lump MT and Wordpress with TypePad and Blogger. Yes, they aren’t hosted, but for the sake of this particular conversation, they serve to support fairly “classic” blogging. LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, Xanga – these all are designed more to create a personal/friend space and network.
My original point is that Spaces seems to me not so much a blog tool, but really a personal web site meant for limited sharing of content with friends and family.
Given the lack of ability to customize the real estate on a Spaces site, I honestly don’t think it is well suited to custom domain names – my site looks like my site, and I can strip out all the Typepad reference if I like. With Spaces, I’m venturing to guess you won’t ever have that functionality – it doesn’t mesh with MSN’s prior history. Expecting it to act like a full featured blog tool may not be the best bet.