Microsoft Live Spaces Rolls Out New Features
Michael Arrington
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Microsoft Live Spaces (rebranded last summer from MSN Spaces) is rolling out some new features this morning and announcing recent usage updates. The enhancements are aimed at making Live Spaces more of a social network and less of a simple blogging/home page service. The changes should be live at 6 am PST.
The main change is that the new home page when you log in shows what’s happening with contacts in your social network, a similar approach as Facebook. Users can also now send messages directly to each other, and add a guestbook module that allows visitors to leave rich-text comments, including photos and videos. There are also enhancements to their APIs - see dev.live,com/spaces for details.
Microsoft says Live Spaces now has 93 million user spaces; recent Comscore stats put them at 112 million monthly unique visitors. 4 billion photos have been uploaded to the service by users, and 18 million new photos are uploaded daily.
Live Spaces is clearly one of the larger social networks. Like Google’s Orkut, though, most of its users seem to be non-U.S. and it is frequently forgotten in this MySpace/Facebook world.
Is this thing still going? I can’t believe anyone would use a Microsoft social network. I mean that’s not a brand with a cool cachet is it? Or maybe it comes preinstalled on new PCs now - the same way Microsoft manages to get anyone to use any of their web services.
These are extremely impressive numbers. 18 million new photos/day?
I don’t think it’s fair to compare it with Orkut though. Orkut is - or used to be - 99% a brazilian site. Live Spaces is a lot more disperse.
As for not being US-centric, well, that’s how the world actually is: the US happens to be the most influential country in many aspects, but still it is just one country, out of many many more…
Many americans have a hard time envisioning the Internet as a truly global village. I mean, they know it is, but anything not in English seems very distant, foreign and useless. That doesn’t happen as much for the rest of the world - they embrace sites using their own language as well as those in English. That is a good thing for US sites, but then, it also results in non-US netsurfers having a broader view and more complete experience of what the Internet really is. They also read blogs from *very smart people* whose names aren’t Scoble, Arrington, Malik, O’Reilly, etc.
Er… Ok I’m a bit out of my league here, my apologies
They do a good job with the Live messenger integration. It’s not completely overwhelming, yet it is also hard to ignore. I’m sure that most Live messenger users have given it a go at some point.
It’s interesting to see how big their numbers really are. Though because of the integration with Messenger I’m sure they have a higher number of dead accounts than other services.
It’ll be interesting to see if a more community-oriented network can make a bigger impact. I always though it seemed to be missing out on that sie of things. Considering it is tightly coupled with Hotmail and Messenger it could be one to watch.
Where are its users from if not the US?
heh Michael -
- Im from the US / We are not the only people in this world
- Mostly big Europe / Bazil / India / etc…
Replying to Michael Camilleri’s question about where are Windows Live Spaces users from, here’s some data (reported by ComScore) from Oct. 2006 that may help to answer your question: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/12750.asp. Thanks–
–Rob
A more social blog sound like a great idea.
I wonder how Google will tweak Blogger.
“Orkut is Brazilian”
Stop telling foolishness, almost all of English speaking Asia will be in Orkut, I can say this India, Pakistan, Srilanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Gulf Countries etc are on it very actively. And the so called web2.0 sites including this one is not taking notice of it.
The US market is a developed market, your expandability is limited compared to the Asian markets so Google is getting everything right, silently (nod)
And the thing everyone must note is that Google is not doing anything in particular for that..it is growing automatically..
I bet on Orkut..it is the future: Americans+UKs != Asia’s youth population
The updates rekindled my love for my first blog (which was a MSN Space) - I recreated this morning… hmm…
Hmm…Server Too Busy!
This this article just dropped it dead!
Hmm.. have they decluttered it at all? The old spaces blogs were all written in tiny Ariel. It felt like reading MSDN articles.
Heh… it’s back up, but are all the recently updated blogs just splogs?
http://him-increase.spaces.live.com/
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Personally I have never been too impressed with Live Spaces, but those numbers are very impressive. Has anyone heard/seen any numbers on the traffic that Yahoo’s 360 gets? 360 always seems to get left out of the discussion, so I was curious as to how it holds up against the likes of Live Spaces.
WTF is Orkut? How can you compare something with 93+ million visitors with a site most people have never heard of?
Cheers Rob. That’s exactly the kind of information I was looking for.
I realise looking back on my comment it made me sound dumb and ignorant of the rest of the world. For the record I’m an Australian currently residing in Japan. My question was more out of interest than disbelief there were countries outside of the United States
Its surprising to see lots of people using Live. Non of my friend has that, except few microsoft employees. I liked the feature when they launched. But didn’t use much.
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From the perspective of a widget company - LiveSpaces easily our number one social network for signups.
Will be interesting to see how successful it turns out to be!
hmm…love it
Jorge, just because you haven’t heard of it. Or most people in onw country does not mean it’s not a very popular service elsewhere in the world. Which is exactly the case with Orkut.
The Spaces upgrade seems to be going well. This is what I’m getting when hitting their homepage:
XML Parsing Error: syntax error
Location: http://spaces.live.com/
Line Number 3, Column 49:
————————————————^
Nice work guys!
Maybe this is come form of Microsoft only HTML that Firefox doesn’t understand 
Diego, I am able to access the homepage using Firefox. I have v2.0.0.3 installed on my computer. Could you try again and give some details regarding the problem you are seeing? Also, can you access your space, or if you do not have one, our team blog at http://thespacecraft.spaces.live.com/? You can leave a comment on The Spacecraft and one of our program managers would be happy to look into it.
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XML Parsing Error: syntax error
this happens in Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061023 SUSE/2.0-30 Firefox/2.0 when running in Linux i think…
i have the same error…
i tried with konqueror and it works fine…
damn micro$oft!!!!
i’m getting the same xml parsing error..any idea about to solve it?
tnx in advance