I think you're correct to a point, but don't rule out the "underdog" variable. Anything Microsoft does is considered "evil" by many whereas anything a Microsoft competitor does is considered a "heroic act of defiance against the evil monopoly".

Sometimes, people just don't pay attention to Microsoft because they're "the man" while Apple, Google, and Yahoo! reap the benefits of being perceived as "less evil", when in fact, they're a corporate entity trying to make money, too.

I agree with you, but I don't want you to think that anything Microsoft does is going to be done on fair ground. There's a lot of negative press about Microsoft simply because it's so big and is very successful.

From what I can tell, the Yahoo APIs aren't licensed for commercial use either without written permission. Same with Google.

http://developer.yahoo.net/faq/

http://www.google.com/apis/api_faq.html#gen13

I'd personally prefer a forum (something like Community Server forums) to a newsgroup, especially if it was searchable.
Newgroup posts are by their nature transient, and also quite spam-prone.

If you're taking feature requests, see my reply to your previous post (I mentiond the need for a method to return lists of posts rather than the whole body of the post).

Oh, and if at all possible it would be great if the API were Compact Framework-friendly (which with the current version might come down to providing an option to use SSL for security, given the lack of support for cryptography in .NETCF 1.x, although hashing algorithm implementations on the other hand are easy to come by)

I think it would be best if all blogging tools used the Atom API, to make things more standardized.

I love MSN Spaces very much, but my primary problems with it so far is reliability. Yes, I realize that its beta, but it has some obvious bugs that occur a lot. The operation abort errors , when are you going to fix those?

Next thing is the interface, making it flexible for user and having greater control over it. You need to work on that. I need more "List", I think I can only have up to 11 list on my blog, I need more. Speaking of list, could we take the functionality even a little further by being able to post images within a list.

More on the interface, why is it off to left? Does it have something to do with my monitors resolution? I would like it to be similar to blog like yours or webblogs approach. Log in issue, why can't I have a simple URL that takes me directly to my editors page.

Categories, I don't know much about web development but on MSN spaces its not natural. I have several categories listed on my website. Categories include, "Computers and the Internet", "Health & Wellness", "Music", "Entertainment", just to name a few. If someone who regularly visits my blog just for music stuff, why can't they type in the URL, http://spaces.msn.com/members/adacosta/music?

These are only just a few of the things that I feel personally could be much better in MSN Spaces, its just too restricting. Yes, I know its not for the technical savvy, but I just need more.

Please?
Thank you

Try appending &format=xml to the end of a query. I wonder if that makes the rss licensing terms moot?

Your blog layout is badly broken on the Safari web browser.

Dare: Take a look at this webpage in a non MS browser--FYI it's almost unreadable.

To the post, you make good points about API usage and pre-registration of app ids and or API keys. I understand the need for keys from the service end (tracking and resource protection) but the implementation end is awful. I'd like to write some Radio-based XML-RPC procedures for Spaces so please make it easy to use for the developer and the hobbiest.

Best

Steve Kirks

AtomAPI(The Atom Publishing Protocol) would be nice.
I developed a blog client that posts to Blogger, TypePad etc using AtomAPI.(shameless... I got a few thousand users in Japan.)
I don't wanna rewrite my a-couple-thousands-lines-of-code just to support MSN Space.

You can extend Atom to fit your need(eg, music list, friends list,photos..).

MSN Search definitely needs to support some type of API architecture. It would be nice if MS took the lead in all of this and would also be nice if MS tried to settle the (seeming) dispute about which model to use.

Currently Google uses SOAP and Yahoo is using REST. It would be really nice if there was some sort of standardization from the developer point of view. Personally I prefer REST, but either is okay.

Licensing restrictions is a *major* issue in my book.

With Google you can get a commercial license though most don't. There the API limit is Per License, meaning anyone can sign up for a free API license and use it themselves, no matter who created the API or where it is used from.

Yahoo is taking another route, where you register the API name itself. Then the License Limit counts against whatever IP (usually a server IP) that queries Y! This model has all sorts of problems IMO, especially when you consider with shared hosting. If there are 500 sites on a single shared server and several of them have a Yahoo API that people are using, all of those queries count against the server. So it's the *server* that gets 5,000 queries per day, not each application. Thus, it would be pretty easy for any developer to totally lock up all of the queries for a server, and anybody else who happens to be hosted on that

At this time, Yahoo does not offer a commercial license. You can write them for one, but they'll tell you they don't have one yet. Trust me, I've tried to obtain one and can't.

As a developer I don't mind having to register the API, per Yahoo's model, at all. But the license limit on a server is troublesome. I also don't mind Google's approach where the User can supply their own API License. Even though their daily limit is far too low IMHO. Neither is perfect by a long stretch.

Hopefully MSN can come up with a model that makes a bit more sense where the licensing is concerned. And at the very least will make the API available via either SOAP or REST so that we developers don't have to code the same application 3 times.