Windows Live Spaces

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Windows Live Spaces
An example of a Windows Live Space
Developer:	Microsoft
Latest release:	11.01.3719.0001 / January 27, 2007
Use:	Social Networking
License:	Freeware
Website:	http://spaces.live.com

Windows Live Spaces (WLSpaces for short) is Microsoft's Social Networking platform. The site was launched in early December 2004 as MSN Spaces, with the aim of allowing its users to reach out to others by publishing their thoughts, photos and interests. With this goal, Windows Live Spaces finds itself competing with similar services like MySpace, Bebo and Yahoo!'s 360°.

Contents 1 PowerToys 2 Contact Cards 3 MSN Spaces to Windows Live Spaces 3.1 Changes to Spaces 3.2 Advertisements 3.3 Browser Issues 3.4 Restrictions 4 Trivia 5 See also 6 External links

[edit] PowerToys

Several "PowerToys" are available for Windows Live Spaces users that allows for greater customisation of an individual's Space. The "Windows Media Player" PowerToy gives users the ability to play and display music and videos on their Windows Live Space. The "Tweak UI" PowerToy, gives users the flexibility to alter the style, color and transparency of certain aspects of a Windows Live Space, while the "Custom HTML" PowerToy grants users the ability to call a small amount of hand-written HTML code (a feature that is often used for displaying banners and other graphics).

All of the PowerToys are beta features which are unsupported and can only be added to a Windows Live Space by the following process:

1. While editing your Windows Live Space, add the relevant code onto the end of your Windows Live Space's URL in your browser's address bar:

  a. For Windows Media Player use: &powertoy=musicvideo
  b. For Tweak UI use: &powertoy=tweakomatic
  c. For Custom HTML use: &powertoy=sandbox

2. Click the Go button next to your web browser's address bar.

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[edit] Contact Cards

Contact Cards, which summarize recent additions to a Windows Live Space for a particular user, are integrated with Windows Live Messenger, MSN Web Messenger and Hotmail Contacts. Clicking on a users icon in your buddy list, pops up their Contact Card which shows thumbnails of their recent photos, a summary of their recent blog entries and a short list of recent songs from their playlist. The contact cards have not yet been updated to the new ones used in Messenger 8.1

[edit] MSN Spaces to Windows Live Spaces

MSN Spaces was Microsoft's free Social Networking platform. The site was launched in early December 2004 with the aim of allowing its users to reach out to others by publishing their thoughts, photos and interests in an easy and compelling way. With this goal, MSN Spaces finds itself competing with similar services like MySpace and Yahoo!'s 360°.

As well as allowing users to share their thoughts, photos and interests, MSN Spaces users were given over 100 varied themes and several different page layouts to choose from when designing their MSN Space. Users also had the option to set access rights for visitors to their MSN Space based on the relationship between them (e.g. Friends, Family etc.). Visitors were also granted when their contacts' had updated their MSN Space. On the 1st of August 2006, MSN Spaces became part of the Windows Live services platform, where it is now rebranded as Windows Live Spaces.

[edit] Changes to Spaces

There are various, obvious differences to between MSN Spaces and Windows Live Spaces, the most instantly evident being a redesigned layout engine.

This allows users greater flexibility in terms of the layout of their "WLSpace", for example, it is now possible to move the "Title and Tagline" as a module, where before it was permanently fixed to the top of the page. It also looks to resolve some oft-criticised characteristics of MSN Spaces, such as the alignment of content on the computer screen. MSN Spaces was designed for resolutions of 800×600 pixels and above, and all content on the page grew out from the left side of the screen. This led to the page occupying only part of the available screen area on displays with resolutions of the order of 1280×1024 pixels, wasting a large area to the right. WLSpaces aligns all content to the centre of the screen and appears to have been designed for best viewing on a resolution of 1024×768 pixels

The url for all MSN Spaces members were moved to keep with the Windows Live branding. (Example - thespacecraft.spaces.msn.com was moved to thespacecraft.spaces.live.com), with the old url continuing to work as a redirect.

[edit] Advertisements

MSN Spaces displayed small text advertisements, often with simple logos at the top of the page. WLSpaces display a single standard sized advertisement banner, which canadvertisement in the Animated GIF or Adobe Flash format. Subscribers to premium Windows Live services are able to turn these advertisements off.

[edit] Browser Issues

Currently Spaces are best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer. Some users of the competing browser, Mozilla Firefox, are finding the site completely unusable (it reports a "missing framework" error). Other users report that it occasionally displays pages incorrectly; a problem inherited from MSN Spaces. Recently, however, some of the Firefox errors seem to have been fixed, like the "missing framework" error and the inability to leave comments on others' spaces through Firefox. Users of the Mac OS X browser, Safari, have also reported limited capabilities, though not to a serious degree.

[edit] Restrictions

The Terms and Conditions that all users must agree to when signing up for a Windows Live Space, grant Microsoft permission to "(1) use, copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, modify, translate and reformat your Submission, each in connection with the MSN Web Sites, and (2) sublicense these rights, to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law." Finally noting that "Microsoft will not pay you for your Submission." [1]

It has also mentioned that Windows Live Spaces censors the words that a user can choose when naming their Space, prohibiting for example the word whore or the so-called "seven dirty words". [2] In addition, Microsoft has received criticism for censoring the words "democracy" and "freedom" under its Chinese portal. [3]

[edit] Trivia

• Windows Live Spaces is one of the fastest growing blogging communities in the world with an estimated 100 million (100,000,000) unique visitors per month as of May 2006. [4]
• In July 2005 a new competition site was launched called the MSN Space Race. Photos of UFOs and aliens had to be taken in order to win the prizes. There was also a hidden UFO somewhere to be located. If someone located this they would win a trip to the NASA Space Center. [5]

[edit] See also

• List of social networking websites

[edit] External links

• Windows Live Spaces Website
• Windows Live Spaces Team Blog
• Windows Live Messenger
• MSN Spaces fact sheet
• ZDNet: Microsoft blog service sparks censorship dodging
• Ownership of Blog Content Product Unit Manager for Windows Live Spaces
• The Register article on Microsoft censorship