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<DIV>The evolution of Windows Live Spaces</DIV>
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<DIV class=month>Jun</DIV>
<DIV class=day>30</DIV>
<DIV class=year>20<BR>10</DIV></DIV>
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<DIV class=user-name><A class="internal-link view-user-profile"
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Tony East</A></DIV></DIV>
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<P>Now that the new generation of <A href="http://home.live.com/"
target=_blank>Windows Live web services</A> has been released, some of you have
asked me why we didn’t make any changes to Spaces. Although we did not make many
noticeable changes to the service, I wanted to do a blog post about Spaces
within the broader context of Windows Live and show how Spaces has had, and
continues to have, a big influence on our overall direction.</P>
<H3>Our fight against spam</H3>
<P>Like many sites, Spaces, too, struggles with the never-ending battle against
spam. Improving in this area was a big priority for us, in both Spaces and <A
href="http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2010/01/12/fighting-the-war-on-spam.aspx"
target=_blank>Hotmail</A>. Our efforts here are already showing signs of
success. For example, during the heaviest period of attacks on Spaces, a
spam-tracking website called <A
href="http://rss.uribl.com/hosters/spaces_live_com.html" target=_blank>Uribl</A>
attributed 1500 spam campaigns to web pages hosted on Spaces, each of these
actively generating hundreds of thousands of Spaces spam attacks. As of this
writing, <B>we have blocked 99% of these spam campaigns,</B> so now Uribl lists
only 15 active spam campaigns on Spaces, all of which are fresh attacks that we
are actively working to disable. Very shortly, we will put even more safeguards
in place to ensure that fewer spam spaces get created, which will bring this
number down even more.</P>
<H4>No more comment spam!</H4>
<P>Comment spam has also been a persistent problem on Spaces. We are attacking
this problem through heightened investment in account validation, limiting the
number of comments you can add in a session, and improving permission settings
so that by default, only friends can comment. All of these efforts combined make
it harder for machine-generated comment spam to get through. </P>
<H4>Setting comment permissions</H4>
<P>Of course, you can still allow public comments on your space, but by default
we limit who can comment on your space to just "friends." For most people, this
default setting is going to make it easier to manage their spaces, but if you
write a popular blog and still want public comments, be sure to go to your
Profile page and then click <B>Privacy settings</B>. Click <B>Advanced</B>,
(direct link <A href="http://profile.live.com/privacy/advanced"
target=_blank>here</A>), and then you can change the permission slider for
“Comments and notes” in the “Who can contact me” section near the bottom:</P>
<P><A
href="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Blogs-Components-WeblogFiles/00-00-00-53-82-metablogapi/4405.whocancontactme_5F00_28D8FA99.jpg"><IMG
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class=wlDisabledImage title="Settings - who can contact me" border=0
alt="settings - who can contact me settings"
src="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Blogs-Components-WeblogFiles/00-00-00-53-82-metablogapi/5100.whocancontactme_5F00_thumb_5F00_0F04C46A.jpg"
width=530 height=119></A></P>
<P>Now that’s out of the way, we can continue with the fun stuff.</P>
<H3>How Spaces has influenced Windows Live </H3>
<P>Let’s start with a bit of history. The year was 2004. Blogging was just going
mainstream, and users were beginning to explore creating their own personal
websites and sharing digital photos on the web. We first launched “MSN Spaces”
in Japan in late 2004 as a blogging service, and quickly built a small but loyal
following. About 6 months later, we added photo sharing and launched Spaces in
the US.</P>
<H4>The “gleam”</H4>
<P><A
href="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Blogs-Components-WeblogFiles/00-00-00-53-82-metablogapi/6661.gleam_5F00_3566A7B5.jpg"><IMG
style="BORDER-RIGHT-WIDTH: 0px; DISPLAY: inline; BORDER-TOP-WIDTH: 0px; BORDER-BOTTOM-WIDTH: 0px; BORDER-LEFT-WIDTH: 0px"
class=wlDisabledImage title='The "gleam"' border=0 alt='The "gleam"'
src="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Blogs-Components-WeblogFiles/00-00-00-53-82-metablogapi/0317.gleam_5F00_thumb_5F00_2E476B3D.jpg"
width=89 height=18></A></P>
<P>By the end of 2005, we'd connected Spaces to Messenger and introduced the
“gleam,” a little orange asterisk in your Messenger contact list that let you
know when your contacts had updated their space. This was the first time you
could use Messenger to follow the online activities of your friends, an early
ancestor to the new Messenger Social feed.</P>
<H3>Blogging, sharing photos, and keeping up with your friends</H3>
<P>Over the next few years, Spaces moved toward three important goals: Giving
you an outlet for personal expression, giving you a place to share photos with
friends and family, and giving you a way to keep up with what was going on with
your closest friends. So now let’s fast forward to 2010 and take a look at
today’s Windows Live, when these goals are still just as important, but are
evolving to meet the demands of the new online world.</P>
<H4>Serious bloggers</H4>
<P><A
href="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Blogs-Components-WeblogFiles/00-00-00-53-82-metablogapi/5037.connectedto_5F00_5515817D.jpg"><IMG
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alt="Connect to other services"
src="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Blogs-Components-WeblogFiles/00-00-00-53-82-metablogapi/5543.connectedto_5F00_thumb_5F00_58B39C5A.jpg"
width=111 height=175></A></P>
<P>Spaces continues to be a popular blogging service, but we also recognize that
bloggers use a broad range of blog hosts. So we made sure that if you are a
serious blogger on Spaces, WordPress.com, or other blogging services, Windows
Live is a great companion to your blog.</P>
<H4>Try the new Writer</H4>
<P><A href="http://explore.live.com/windows-live-writer" target=_blank>Windows
Live Writer</A> is a fantastic blogging tool that lets you publish to almost any
blogging service. You can preview your posts and get your photos and videos
looking just the way you want them before you publish. With our plug-ins you can
quickly embed video clips from YouTube or photos you already uploaded to
Facebook. Try the new Writer beta today as part of the <A
href="http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta"
target=_blank>Windows Live Essentials beta</A>.</P>
<P><A
href="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Blogs-Components-WeblogFiles/00-00-00-53-82-metablogapi/3225.WLEbeta_5F00_6D38EBD8.jpg"><IMG
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width=400 height=129></A></P>
<H4>Connect your blog to Windows Live</H4>
<P>Connecting your blog to Windows Live is like giving all your Messenger
friends a subscription to your blog’s RSS feed. Every time you publish a new
post, they will see a nice summary with a link to the post, right in Messenger.
And connecting is easy to do. On the left side of the Profile page is a list of
the services you have connected to Windows Live, and a link to <A
href="http://profile.live.com/Services/?category=Featured" target=_blank>connect
new services</A>. No matter where you host your blog, connecting it to Windows
Live makes it better.<B></B></P>
<H4>Personal expression for the rest of us</H4>
<P>We saw that lots of people who had once used Spaces stopped using it, or used
it only for photo albums. They liked the ability to show their family and their
friends what they were up to, but didn’t want to have to keep updating it all
the time. We needed a simpler way to share.</P>
<H4>The move from blogging to just sharing</H4>
<P>Although Spaces continues to be a popular blogging platform, fewer people are
blogging in the traditional sense, and more people are just sharing. What do I
mean? Most people don’t want to take time to configure a blog or don’t think
they have enough to say to spend time writing and editing long posts (like this
one!) but they do want to share short updates, photos, and cool links they come
across on the web.</P>
<H4>Your status message – now with photos and links!</H4>
<P><A
href="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Blogs-Components-WeblogFiles/00-00-00-53-82-metablogapi/2671.expression_5F00_73138F71.jpg"><IMG
style="BORDER-RIGHT-WIDTH: 0px; DISPLAY: inline; BORDER-TOP-WIDTH: 0px; BORDER-BOTTOM-WIDTH: 0px; BORDER-LEFT-WIDTH: 0px"
class=wlDisabledImage title="Status message" border=0 alt="Status message"
src="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Blogs-Components-WeblogFiles/00-00-00-53-82-metablogapi/3771.expression_5F00_thumb_5F00_2B52068A.jpg"
width=400 height=131></A></P>
<P>We decided the best way to support sharing in our new release would be to
deepen the ability to share via your Messenger status message. By adding the
ability to share photos, <A href="http://office.live.com/" target=_blank>Office
documents</A>, and links, we made it easier to share anything that’s on your
mind. It gets even better when you connect Windows Live to Facebook since the
things you share from Messenger show up there for all your friends to see and
add their comments, even if they don’t use Windows Live. This works from
Messenger, your phone (even from an <A
href="http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2010/06/21/taking-windows-live-messenger-with-you-on-your-iphone.aspx"
target=_blank>iPhone</A>), or Hotmail to give you simple, powerful sharing
wherever your friends are. We also give you a very blog-like historical view of
your status messages and other activities on the “Me” tab of the social feed in
Windows Live Messenger beta (or by going to your Profile page on the web). For
most users this is as much “blog” as they need.</P>
<H4>Customization and personalization</H4>
<P>The flexible nature of Spaces gave people a powerful way to express
themselves through the use of themes, modules, and layouts. While some of you
spent a great deal of time getting your space “just right,” many of you just
wanted a simpler way to express yourselves. The <A
href="http://profile.live.com/" target=_blank>Windows Live Profile</A> service
lets you pick a dynamic theme to express their personality and has become the
central place on Windows Live to see information about someone, including their
recent activity and the services they're connected to.</P>
<H3>Photo sharing</H3>
<P>Spaces provided the first photo sharing experience in Windows Live. Over half
of all Spaces are used exclusively for photo sharing. Most of the people using
Spaces this way wanted the ability to show photos to their family and friends
but weren’t interested in other Spaces features.</P>
<H4>Photos.live.com</H4>
<P><A
href="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Blogs-Components-WeblogFiles/00-00-00-53-82-metablogapi/5344.photo_5F00_3198DD18.jpg"><IMG
style="BORDER-RIGHT-WIDTH: 0px; DISPLAY: inline; BORDER-TOP-WIDTH: 0px; BORDER-BOTTOM-WIDTH: 0px; BORDER-LEFT-WIDTH: 0px"
class=wlDisabledImage title="Shared photo gallery" border=0
alt="Shared photo gallery"
src="http://windowsteamblog.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Blogs-Components-WeblogFiles/00-00-00-53-82-metablogapi/0676.photo_5F00_thumb_5F00_7BB3E7FD.jpg"
width=340 height=320></A></P>
<P>So, a couple of years ago, based on the high demand for photo sharing, we
began to evolve the Spaces photo sharing feature into a first class Windows Live
experience built on Windows Live SkyDrive. We launched <A
href="http://photos.live.com/" target=_blank>photos.live.com</A> in December
2008 and since then, customers have shared over 2.5 billion photos with each
other on SkyDrive.</P>
<H4>Photos everywhere</H4>
<P>In our most recent release, we continued the momentum with more investment in
photo sharing features: in Messenger (check out the photos tab!), and in Hotmail
with Active View (the ability to view photo attachments right from your inbox –
see Dick Craddock’s <A
href="http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2010/05/17/re-inventing-windows-live-hotmail-the-next-generation-of-personal-email.aspx"
target=_blank>post</A>), and a beautiful new immersive slide show in Skydrive
with commenting, people tagging, and web Messenger (but that’s a blog post for
another day). When you connect Windows Live to Facebook, you'll see all the
photos shared with you, from Facebook or Windows Live, right in Messenger.</P>
<H4>Keeping up with the people you care about</H4>
<P>While the original Messenger “gleam” made it easy to see when someone had
changed their space (the first Messenger Social integration), the newest version
of Windows Live makes it easy to aggregate all of your activities across the web
automatically. You connect Windows Live with the services where your closest
friends do their sharing, whether it is photos on SmugMug or a blog on
WordPress.com, and then use Messenger to keep up with what is going on with
them. So now, instead of hinting at updates with “gleams,” we have brought all
the information right into Messenger with the Messenger Social feed. Piero
Sierra has written <A
href="http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2010/06/22/windows-live-messenger-full-or-compact-view-you-decide.aspx"
target=_blank>a great post</A> on this.</P>
<H3>Looking ahead</H3>
<P>Spaces continues to impact the direction of Windows Live. We will continue to
look at how you use Spaces, as well as how you share online in general and on
Windows Live, so that we can keep improving your core experiences on Windows
Live.</P>
<P>Tony East, Senior Lead Program Manager, Windows
Live</P></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></FORM></FONT></DIV>
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