Spaces Search. This
is an incredibly cool feature that lets you find interesting spaces based on
keyword, a user's profile information, or by clicking on most popular interests
across all of spaces. You can also run a search from any space just by clicking
"Search Spaces" in the header above. One thing to mention about the search
feature is that it will be ramping up for a few days - but you
can help make it better! Learn more about this on The Space Craft.
Mobile Search from Mobile Spaces! Search for spaces from
your mobile device. Mike Smuga will be talking about this more over on his space soon.
Your own advertising on your space (as an option) to
make money from clicks - powered by Kanoodle! (This feature is only available
in the United States and Canada at this time.)
Book lists with Amazon
integration. Automatically insert information from Amazon.com directly into
your book list - and again, make money through Amazon Associates when people end up
buying the book! It's very cool (by the way, our book is called Share Your
Story if you want to add it to your book list :)
Better blog navigation. This feature is one of those
things we needed to do. You can now "view more entries" at the bottom of the
page, and navigate through Previous and Next pages while looking through blog
entries.
Customized blog entry display. Choose how you want your
blog entries to appear, by date or entry title. This is a great feature for
people who write essays or incredibly insightful posts once a month. Date isn't
really important in this case, whereas sorting by entry title may make more
sense.
Integrated Help. Confused? Click the Learn link
in the header above to figure out what to do next!
Enhanced Profile including General, Social, and Contact
Info sections. Each section will have it's own permissions so any part you
would like to limit access to (say your personal contact information), you can
do it. There's also an updated profile module for the homepage
with an actionable photo; anytime you see someone's picture
anywhere you can right-click (or click on the down arrow) to view their
contact card, space, profile, and more.
Live Contacts Beta! Brand new feature which you'll see
popping up throughout Windows Live in time. What is it? It's the ability to
subscribe to automatic contact updates. When your friend changes his or her
address or phone number (in their Profile mentioned above), your address book
will be automatically updated if you are subscribed to updates. This
is crazy cool. Learn more here
(an overview will be posted soon)
Which reminds me: Spaces now has contact cards like MSN/Windows Live
Messenger! Just right-click on someone's profile photo (or click on
the down arrow) and select "View contact card" to see a preview of their space.
Better commenting for blogs and now photos as
well! This feature also has an (optional) clickable profile
photo that you can leave behind when leaving a comment. And there's
a mini text editor so you can format your comments (something
I'm really glad we did!) kinda like blog entries. Note that if you would like
to turn off photo comments, you can do this in Settings.
Photos are no longer limited to 30MB; you can now upload
500 photos per month without worrying about running out of storage
space.
MetaWeblog API (OK, this one is from December – but
it's still cool). Read more here.
Better URLs! Sometimes the little things matter the most.
This is one of those things. Say goodbye to /members/. You can now be reached
at http://spaces.msn.com/[username]. For example, http://spaces.msn.com/mike now works!
We also have cleaner paths to pages, so if you want to give someone a link to
your blog or to your photos, you can send them to
http://spaces.msn.com/[username]/blog or
/photos.
Xbox Live integration. Themes, recent games module, and
gamer card integration! This feature has been the single biggest reason my
gamer score is now clocking in at 500 instead of 0. If you're into Xbox Live,
these features rock! Check out my theme and gamer card and you can see why.
New themes and categorized theme picker. We now have well
over 100 themes!
Do you like email or mobile publishing? You can now publish from 3
email addresses instead of just one.
For those of you with private spaces (you know who you are!) people can now
request access to spaces via anonymous email. I like to think
about this as "knocking on the door of someone's house".
Privacy controls (communication preferences)
for who can request access to your space and to your contact
information and how. Check it out in Settings.
We doubled the size limit on the HTML PowerToy.