Account name
A descriptive name, such as My MSN Space.

Username

The name of your space. For example, if your space's URL is http://spaces.msn.com/example, use example.

Password
The secret keyword you entered on your space's E-mail Publishing tab.

Host address

Page (or path)
Use storage.msn.com

Been a little while since updating this blog and it is nice to see several changes afoot at MSN Spaces including:

- comments on pictures
- 100 templates

- 500 pictures a month limit, no more max space limit
-  make money using Amazon (see quote below)

- xbox recent games played integration option
- updated profile photo
- removal of "members" from URL
- permissions changes as well

Quote

Change is good!

Great news for those of you living in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France or Japan.  You can now make money with MSN Spaces.  You heard me.  Make Money!  With Amazon.com if you sign up for an associates ID, whenever anyone buys a book from Amazon.com by linking through from your space, you get a portion of that.  So make sure to put up all of your favorite and maybe not so favorite books online.

 

In the same vain if you live in the US or Canada, you can earn money by allowing Kanoodle ads to run in your space.

I particularly liked the shorter URL with getting rid of the whole "member" thing. Hopefully clean redirects are in place so prior links weren't broken.

While trying to publish this post I received a "this space is temporarily unavailable" message.

On my birthday last month, I saw Dare talking about public beta testing of the MetaWeblog API and XML-RPC for MSN Spaces: 

Quote

Carnage4Life's Space: Dates and Times in the MetaWeblog API and XML-RPC

We're almost ready to begin public beta testing of our implementation of the MetaWeblog API for MSN Spaces. As with most technology specifications, the devil has been in the details of figuring out how common practice differs from what is in the spec.

Wonder when this will be implemented? Did I miss the beta launch news?

Cleaned out a bunch of spam from domains-that-look-a-like.this.com. Maybe this is something for MSN Spaces Team to consider filtering. If a site has more than one dash in the domain there is a 99.999999% it's spam. I never was able to send myself trackbacks from any of my other blogs here anyway. There have been a few legitimate non MSN Spaces trackbacks so it does work with some blog software out there. I didn't really explore this one to figure out what the problem is, but maybe somebody else reading has or can do so.

So is Passport now required to view MSN Spaces blogs or what? I just got hit tonight with a bunch of Passport demographic data trying to access the "public" part of my MSN Space. Here's to hoping that this was just a Passport glitch. Nobody seems to care much for Passport, even some of the M$ employees hate it.

Look, I'm just trying to report some abuse from another MSN Spaces blog that is ripping off entire original blog entries from another blog and posting them as their own, along with hotlinking the pictures, also on their MSN Spaces blog. It appears to me like it's not just happening to one blog, but many. Worse yet, they are encouraging others to steal their stolen content!

Every time I try and access the MSN Spaces REPORT ABUSE page it tries to have me sign up for .NET Passport account. Mike, Dare, can somebody please fix this and delete this MSN Spaces blog that is not only thieving content and bandwidth but also encouraging others to steal with comments like: "The Motto of Any Fool Can Blog is 'All the news thats fit to steal'"

Yeah, they got that part right: steal.

Wait, hmm, it seems that after my fifth attempt and right before posting this I actually got through. I kept clicking cancel on the message and it finally defaulted to a sign-on screen for MSN Support (even though it shows me as already signed on to .NET Passport). I filled out the form and submitted, so maybe that will make something happen. Here's my report (Your Support Ticket Number : 192290148) in case somebody wants to act faster on this:

COPYRIGHT VIOLATION: http://spaces.msn.com/members/anyfoolcanblog/Blog/cns!1paHQNsbIBUV8yl3GwluuN3g!1551.entry

Is a direct copy of this original, copyrighted material: http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20050503/1805/

They also are hotlinking many, many other pictures from other sites and read the sidebar comments where they are telling others: "So if you see something you like here steal it and pass it on."

This blog is an accident waiting to happen!

Shortly after MSN Spaces launched I read that maybe someday we'd be able to host blogs created via MSN Spaces on our own domains, so I registered two domains that have to do with the title of this blog, so I'd be set when/if this day ever came.

As the months have gone by it seems clear to me that these domains would continue to gather dust if I didn't do something on my own, so this last week I came up with an idea of how I'm going to use these domains ... at least in the interim until/if MSN Spaces does finally allow us to publish to our own domains.

I will hopefully be able to implement this solution soon and share with others, but we'll see. My May schedule is pretty full.

Some folks might be thinking, hey: who cares about hosting on your own domain. Well, for one, on your own hosting/domain you can insert scripts, interact with database and do so much more than you will ever be able to do with MSN Spaces directly.

Good to see an MSN Spaces upgrade this week. Mike Torres reports that they have tweaked RSS and pinging, which was needed (thank you). They have added more themes, and I changed to this Xbox-green theme ... not sure if I'll stay with it. Frankly, I don't really care for any of these themes. Please somebody give us the ability to edit/create our own custom templates. Sure, you can put your new Volvo ads at the top and copyright notice and TOS at the bottom but why can I share my playlist, share photos but not share my own custom theme? This one doesn't fit the strategy as far as I understand it, anyway.

I understand Spaces isn't aimed at early adopters, regular bloggers, etc, but if this is truly my personal "space" then why can't I put the kind of wallpaper I personally want up? Lock it down with no malicious script code if that's what you are worried about. Certainly you guys can write a parser to protect against harmful code injection if that's the concern, yes? I've never heard a good reason why custom template designs aren't allowed. Heck, make it a fun thing like a contest or something for Spaces members who have the most creative templates. There's got to be some way to make this happen ... what do you say? 

Hopefully custom themes is something that can/will be made in a future version. Mike did ask for the one thing people would like to see and I guess if I can't get the ability to host from my own domain, than that would be next: true template customization. That would help MSN Spaces users better personalize the experience.

Anyway, I don't want this to sound like a total moan/groan-fest because I like that the Spaces team are moving the needle and I also like how receptive and responsive the MSN Spaces team continues to be to constructive criticism, questions and commentary. I'm sure I'll have more to say after I've had some spare time to poke around and try things out.

WTG and congrats on the 4.5 million Spaces!

Dave Winer has added a special page for most recently updated MSN Spaces blogs. There's an option in MSN Spaces to add a few of the most recently updated spaces blogs to the page.

I'm starting to lose interest in MSN Spaces as a blogging tool.

Some of the future features that have been hinted at like the ability to host a spaces at our own domain like blogger does need to come to fruition to revitalize my interest in this service. I purchased a domain for this very purpose months ago and they sit, collectin dust.

Not just me though, I don't hear many others talking about MSN Spaces any more either. I know the target audience isn't regular bloggers, but just people who want to have a journal, but if Microsoft really wants MSN Spaces to compete with blogger then they need to add the ability to run off their own domain and open up the template customization a lot more.

Otherwise this will become -- maybe it already is -- just a glorified diary for sharing notes, pictures and music playlists with family and friends.

One of the big M$ criticisms, fair or not this is to you to decide, is that they bulldoze their way into a market and then don't move things forward. MSN Spaces clearly made a splash but I'm getting bored with it now. Sorry.

Being self-critical is a good skill to demonstrate in business and displays a willingness to improve a product or service. Mike Torres, one of the people behind MSN Spaces, has posted his personal dislike list of the current incarnation of MSN Spaces:

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5 things I dislike about MSN Spaces

Anyway, my point: I have used a bunch of different tools (and even wrote my own on the .NET Framework beta).  Not a single one of them does everything I want it to do, MSN Spaces included.  There are places that TypePad outshines us, and there are areas where LiveJournal kicks our butts.  Of course, there are also things we do better than they do too :)

But we know we aren't perfect.  Hence this post.

Five things I dislike about MSN Spaces:

1. I can't use BlogJet to post to my blog today.  Not a huge deal, but I love this little tool.  Web browsers (Firefox included!) just don't do it for me in the way of text editing.
2. We don't have enough themes, which means there isn't enough differentiation between spaces.  People come in a lot of flavors.
3. We don't have comments on anything other than blog entries, which means a lot of people are using comments to either a) comment on photos, or b) comment on the space itself.
4. The Statistics page doesn't roll-up RSS aggregator "hits", only web page-views.  I want to know who is reading this post in various aggregators.
5. The recent blog entry on the MSN Messenger 7.0 beta contact card doesn't show enough information to compel me to visit the user's space. 

Disclaimer: I am just one member of the MSN Spaces team.  There are a bunch of us, and I can almost 100% guarantee that not a single person would have the same 5 items on their list.  Additionally, just because I don't like something doesn't mean we are already "fixing it" - but it doesn't mean we aren't either!

Basically what I am saying: these are just my personal thoughts.  Don't read too far into them.

So, what do you dislike?  Have you added your requests to our wiki over on Channel 9 yet?  Have you sent us email via the Feedback button below?  Have you commented on my blog?  If so, we have heard you loud and clear.  If not, why not?<

I have a couple things I'd add to this list, and this is in no particular order of importance, namely (and I'm sure my list is incomplete, but these are just a few things that would be nice):

• Timed posting. Allowing bloggers the option to schedule their posts is handy instead of posting one after another in a machine gun style.
• Allow at least some template editing. This sort of meshes with Mike's post on their not being enough themes. If at least minor template editing would be allowed then bloggers could better personalize their Spaces. Blogs that all look mostly the same are boring.
• Choose which image directory to attribute photos to in a blog entry. Currently you can add photos to a blog entry which is great, but it would be nice to be able to categorize those photos. Is this possible now and I just don't know how?
• Ability to remove default categories. Custom categories are put in the bottom of the list of default categories which requires a scroll when picking out the requested category.
• Not a request, really, but it would be cool if I could ink my posts directly from my Tablet PC and have them transferred into an image automatically in MSN Spaces blog post.
• *** Ability to add local blog search form directly to blog *** This way myself and readers could search past blog entries from this MSN Space specifically. If I could only have one of these requests fulfilled, this would be the one, Mike.

Hope this helps and thank you for being so open for feedback.

I haven't had a chance to analyze the trackback pings being sent out from MSN Spaces to see if it's something on the blog script I'm using end, but every trackback received from MSN Spaces is missing a link back to the MSN Spaces blog permalink. Trackbacks received from other programs are being accepted just fine, but MSN Spaces doesn't seem to be working correctly. Example here. Maybe somebody from the Spaces team will see this and provide some sort of explanation or workaround.