Improvements coming to Windows Live Spaces!
This has been the week for news about Windows Live. After my paranoid post about Live Spaces being doomed, Jamie Thomson gave me a tutorial on some of the changes he has seen in the next update to the blogging service. Now comes some great news from the Space Craft about what to expect:
Your space is all about your content, the way you want to show it, so we’re reducing the amount of clutter and giving you more freedom by:
- Removing the horizontal ad from the top of your space
- Making all of the modules optional (even the Title and Tagline module, which previously couldn’t be removed)
- Using a simpler header that has less text than other pages in Windows Live
- Letting you change themes, fonts, colors, and background images on your space using the customize menu
- Letting you rename or not show the title of each module on your space by using the settings menu for each module in customize mode
- Letting you select exactly which photo albums to show in your photos module – you can even customize what parts of the photos interface to display
Read the entire entry here
This release is heavily focused on consumer experiences such as photos. Its particularly nice to see the removal of the horizontal ad which just kills the space. I hope they do this for Hotmail too. I still have suggestions that I hope the Spaces Team takes into consideration, here are 7 I came up with:
1. I am working across multiple computers, so that level of personalization I would be able to add through tools like Windows Live Writer is not there, example, tagging, adding photos, videos, wrapping text and so on. I hope the web interface form improves in the future to support something as simple as tagging because I think it helps a great deal with reaching out to your audience.
2. Why not make 'Joe's profile, blog name... Photos, Blog, Lists, More' inline with the Windows Live Logo to conserve and provide more space? I believe it would look better that way or at least provide the option to.
3. As Brett noted, please implement a solution to deal with the comment spam, its causing a lot of problems over at my blog, especially from Chinese commenter's. I have suggested implementing and option of blocking users from a specific region/location. So, I would prefer to get comments from North America, Europe, Caribbean and certain parts of Asia.
Please see the following post I have made about it:
http://adacosta.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E8E5CC039D51E3DB!20273.entry
http://adacosta.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E8E5CC039D51E3DB!18809.entry
4.Ability to customize permalinks so they are not so ghastly. A post about 'Going to the beach this summer' isn't adacosta.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E8E5CC039D51E3DB!20273.entry, but something more elegant like http://adacosta.spaces.live.com/blog/going-to-the-beach-this-summer-11-19-08.entry
5. Ability to customize the header/banner part of the space with your own personal image. Just like you can now in Windows Live Messenger 9.
6. The search experience is lousy, I can't give my readers the opportunity to search my Live Space in a relevant and natural way (I don't know if this is attributed to the lousy Windows Live Search). I have tried to relay my feedback to the Spaces Team, but sometimes it just falls on deaf airs it seems. Please let me see search results similar to how I see results on Google.
7. Double post, I didn't purposely click Add two times, its your server that did it. I commented on a friends blog and it said said 'issue trying to connect to server', all of a sudden I see six of the same comments from me. Its ridiculous.
8. Last but not least, performance, please make the load times faster especially for dial up users. I want you to add whatever secret sauce you added to Windows Live Hotmail wave 3. That thing is blazing fast.
These are just some of the things I have in mind I believe could make me feel more comfortable on this platform. I have been a fan of the service since December 9, 2004 and I want to continue my relationship with the service and see it grow into something we can all appreciate and respect.
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