While they seem to be having some hiccups in the rollout – and it’s a massive rollout, 100+ million users getting updated near simultaneously from what I understand – the Windows Live Spaces team is cranking out their namesake application. It’s more than just a rebrand of MSN Spaces – beyond the fancy new skin, it includes easy support for adding in gadgets and a new social networking Friends of Friends feature.

Read about it at:

The Space Craft – Spaces team official blog

TechCrunch - “Live.com Spaces still isn’t as “cool” as Myspace or have the music angle, but it is a significantly more flexible platform and has a huge member base (especially in Asia) that is growing rapidly. It’ll be interesting to check out the comscore numbers in a couple of months to see what kind of growth it generates.”

Niall Kennedy – “The new friends integration is the real hotness.”

On10.net – catch the video demo with Mike Torres, PM from the Spaces team

UPDATE: I left off a bit of commentary – what makes Live Spaces, and overall the Windows Live platform so interesting is the cross-service integration. For instance there is a tight connection back to your WL Messenger buddy list, Windows Live Alerts, your postings or searches on Expo, your underlying contact store, which in turn connects back to Live Mail, and so on.

For readers in the US the implications of this may be a bit hard to grok – many of you are using Wordpress, Craigslist, Trillion, and Gmail so issue a collective “yeah, so?” But leave our borders and both Spaces and Messenger are incredibly popular applications, and these cross-service scenarios will lead to some pretty wild usage #s and some very deep user experiences within a pure Live environment.

Yes, Live has a ways to go to tackle the Google beast when it comes to Search and ad platforms, a topic for another post, but on the social and communication app fronts, there are some pretty compelling stories rolling out.

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