Live Spaces

MSN spaces has gone through numerous changes ever since I've started to blog my Wazeeland. The url for our blog area has been altered countless of times and eventually, MSN spaces has been revamped to Windows Live Spaces as part of the Live.com experience. On top of that, the team has released their Windows Live Writer (see here), a desktop blog publishing application, that is free to download and is surprisingly compatible with the likes of blogger, wordpress and many others (as quoted by wikipedia). While Meli Meli currently swears by it, I have yet to have a go at this "masterpiece".

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As a result of these many updates, frustration and anger have peeked amongst its users given that the many simple tweaking we have been doing has been lost along the way. The fact that Rem, whose Gothic space has had countless of hits, visitors and comments, is no more further testifies to this. In an email exchange I have had with him in the early days of August this year, he has made it clear that his space is currently in private status in protest to these changes. And if there is still some trace of doubt wrt all this in your mind (i.e. that it may well be hearsays or lies), please read through the comments at Korku Anomah Space for they give a better picture as to how bad some of the users have been affected. Fortunately, I haven't subjected Wazeeland to much major modifications nor have I added too much unsupported features. One of the many reasons has been that I've wanted to keep it simple so that it allows for a relatively quick access and so that it doesn't deplete my bandwidth. Thus, its sparing in all this!

So far, Windows Live Spaces still restricts the user in making some neat tweaking/ customisation to its template but given the simplicity with which one can blog (without having to worry much about the coding), I guess for now it will have to do. Also, it is closely linked to messenger and this does supposedly further enrich the associated online social networking it is attributed with. Having made some really great friends around here, I think in some ways, Windows Live Spaces is indeed bloody awesome! The downside is that, at the moment, out of these public live spaces I've been through, there is only five Mauritians (estimate) who are regularly blogging away. These are Meli Meli, Pam, Rai, some random Mauritian dude who will pop in for some quickie on his/her blog every 6-12 months, and the weirdo that is Waz. When bong Lulu has had me ass around here, I've been hoping that there will be a strong online Mauritian community with which I can indentify. Imagine my disapointment! hmmmm, it will appear that everybody is at hi5, friendster, Mauritius Interactive or some other online community. Been there and most of them more or less sucks in about every aspects of "suckability 101"!!! btw, the above figure may be wrong given that the live space search rarely gives me what I want! Despite the help from Spaces Search: Demystified - UI version, I still think that the search engine is pretty much hopeless for at times, I end up with zero hits (with key words: Mauritius, Mauritian) when I know from my list of bookmarked spaces that there are quite a few out there. If not, then I may be given the same name and blog over and over again!!!! aaaaargh!!!! Hopefully, this has changed now that it is no longer in beta form.




More about Live Spaces:
Windows Live Spaces (wikipedia)
Windows Live Writer (wikipedia)
List of Social Networking Websites (wikipedia: Live spaces features 30 million users!?!)

Blog about/ for Live Spaces
The Space Craft
Writer Zone
Scoble says half of all Live spaces are not blogs
Is Microsoft really the largest blog vendor? (see his definition of a blog!)
MSTechToday

technorati tag: morisien mwa, blog, windows live spaces, live spaces, msn spaces