While I was at ETech last week the MSN Spaces team shipped a bunch of features. One of which I is the biggest feature I've been working on since joining MSN. The new features are

• Social networking module now available for Australian users - Users in Australia can now expose their friends via a social networking module and visitors to their spaces can browse their social network.

• Windows Live Expo module - post a free listing on Expo and have an abstract and thumbnail image displayed automatically on the front page of your MSN Space. Visitors to your Space can view abstracts from your different Expo listings and click directly to view more information

• RSS feed module - Add headlines from various RSS feeds to your space. Perhaps I'll add my del.icio.us bookmarks to my space.

• No more ads on your space if you are an MSN Premium customer - self explanatory

• Support for Microsoft's Simple List Extensions for RSS - MSN Spaces now supports Simple List Extensions for RSS. This means that if you use Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 you'll be able to do things like filtering the contents of a Space's feed by type (i.e. blog entry, photo album, music list, etc).

• Contact controls now show Messenger online status - If you view the contact control for one of your Messenger buddies somewhere on MSN Spaces you will see an indicator of their online status as well as a 'gleam' if there is new content on their space you haven't seen.

My favorite new [beta] feature is the social networking which I did a bunch of the backend design for. My next blog post will cover it in more detail.