MSN Spaces

I was reading Neowin.net this morning (like I do most days) and I noticed that MSN has launched the public beta of Spaces, there own Blog service. Since I have a Hotmail account already, I figured I would give it a shot.

My experience was typical, for me, of most Microsoft products: a fairly clean UI setup, with many high level options, but very few ways to truly customize. There are little things that bugged me within moments of trying to set one up. For example, on each space, there is a content area for updated spaces (on the right-side), which shows all of the recently updated Spaces. Why would I want that on my Space? How do I get rid of it? I couldn’t seem to. Another thing that is missing, the new posts don’t appear to allow HTML, so it doesn’t seem like you can have a simple hot link in a post.

While this new Blog service may appeal too many who are new to Blogging, I don't expect that it will be popular with most experienced internet users. If you are curious as to what it looks like, or just want to see my Spaces space (boy, that sounds awkward...) it is located at http://spaces.msn.com/members/dah007/ (note that I have not done much with it). One final note, I used Firefox to setup and browse my Space, and it worked perfectly, way to go Microsoft, supporting more than just IE, about time...