I noticed that the Many2Many weblog on social software has an entry entitled Ballmer Gets Blogging Religion which contains a review of MSN Spaces by Liz Lawley. She wrote

I set up an account there today (and was required to use my Microsoft Passport, which didn’t thrill me). My first impression was generally positive. The blogs support trackbacks, a notable omission in Blogger. They also have RSS feeds, which is good, but no Atom, which is disappointing. The built-in photo album is a nice touch, though it doesn’t hold a candle to Flickr. There are a range of themes to choose from, some of which are quite lovely. However, the site warns me that without Internet Explorer (for the PC, natch), I can’t take advantage of the full range of customization options. (To their credit, the site works well in Firefox on my Mac.)

The response time on the server is pretty sluggish this evening, which is a bit of a concern. And in general, I’m always nervous about having my blog posts hosted on a central service that I don’t control—I like having my text on a server that I can back up whenever I’d like. Not to mention that I feel pretty strongly about having my blog at my own domain name, free of ties to specific hosting services or tools.

All in all, I found Spaces to be a very credible and more fully-featured alternative to Blogger for users who want to set up a blog quickly and easily, and don’t want to spend money doing so (or learn a lot of technical skills to accomplish it). From accounts I’ve been reading lately, Blogger has been increasingly slow and unreliable—not ideal qualities at any time, but particularly not when a big-time competitor has just unleashed an alternative.

I was talking to Mike this afternoon and we were flattered by the feedback we got from Liz's review. There are a number of issues that Liz raises that I felt I should comment on.

The first point of clarification is about not supporting Atom feeds. The explanation for why MSN Spaces supports RSS 2.0 and not RSS 1.0 or Atom 0.3 is described in my post from several months ago entitled Mr. Safe's Guide to the RSS vs. Atom debate. Basically RSS 2.0 is the widest supported and most straightforward syndication format. Also there is no technical reason to support multiple syndication formats especially since it is potentially confusing to end users.

The built-in photo album may not be as powerful as an entire site focused on photo sharing such as Flickr or deviantART but I think it does a good job of allowing people to share photos in a simple, straightforward manner while allowing a richer expressivity than is currently provided by any of the major hosted blogging providers. The MSN Spaces team is always open to feedback on how to improve the service and I'm particularly curious as to what improvements or features others would like to see in the realm of photo sharing.

The performance issues Liz encountered on the days she tried the site have since been fixed. It was a combination of bad luck [hardware problems on some key servers] and unanticipated load in certain scenarios. Our GPM is fond of pointing out that no amount of stress testing can accurately potray actual usage of a service :)

Our team is paying attention to the various performance issues and we have tackled a number of the causes of sluggishness in the site. Any problems should be reported to through the feedback form on the site or can even be sent to me directly if necessary.  However I can't promise that I'll get back to every email immediately.

Thanks for the excellent feedback Liz.