Like everyone else, when I heard MSN Spaces was up and running I rushed over to set up my own Space. Don’t bother clicking on the link. The space is empty. Well, not exactly. It has all that nice stock UI that Spaces provides. It’s a job well done.
Why is it empty? Shouldn’t it have the obligatory “Hello Blogosphere” post? I tried. It didn’t work. “What? How can that be. Posting works for me and everyone else,” you say.
This is what happened: I opened Journal, drew a message (in ink of course) and then tried to post it via an email message. Configuring Spaces to receive an email post was easy. But then I realized I had a format problem. Spaces is text biased. I want to email a Journal mht file to the Space. So I slumped in my chair and thought, “Eh, I guess I’ll post the ink as a fortified GIF (containing ink).”
About that time Lora messages me a link to her Spaces site where she’s already loaded three sets of images–each in a wonderful slide show. And then we realize that in terms of pictures, Spaces is photo biased. It’ll shrink my ink GIF to a thumbnail in the post and then place it in the slide show. Eh, this isn’t going to work. So I stopped. I could have posted the GIF anyway, but I was now distracted by thinking about “What Spaces is and What things I’d like to do with it.”
MSN Spaces is absolutely the best candidate for ink blogging support there is. Oh how I wish that the post input area minimally had an ink mode, something like my toy ASP page or Julia’s Doodling page. Maybe this will be a feature for the future.
I have to hand it to the Spaces team, they did come up with a decidedly Microsoft twist to blogging. It is different and it got me thinking. Here are some ideas that came to mind. Some may not be all that practical, but I’ll post them anyway. Maybe it’ll inspire some other ideas. Here goes.
First, I like the photo support with the slideshows. I want that on my blog :-). It’s a winning feature. But I want more control over my photos in the blogging space. Shouldn’t I be able to post something as a blog entry and not have it appear in the slide show? Not all photos are equal. In fact, maybe a “photo” is not a photo at all. Maybe it’s a screenshot or a cartoon I’ve drawn or an ink message. Could be I missed how to configure Spaces to do this.
Second, all this photo thinking got me to brainstorm out of the box. Forget blogging per se, run with the Spaces concept, tie my storage with my 250MB of Hotmail space and let me store all my photos as soon as I take them from my camera or my WebcamNotes app. (I don’t have a camera phone, but if I did I’d add this to the list.) And add a slick sorting view so I can go through the pictures and decide which ones I’d like public and which ones I’d like to just share with a select group or not at all.
And if MSN could become my place of choice for storing and sharing many of my new and best photos, why couldn’t I place some documents I’m working on in my Space? In fact, what if apps I write could talk with My Space directly and store data there? When working between multiple machines, I bet I’d rather have my data in My Spaces on a remote server accessible from whatever machine I’m working on rather than My Documents locally. OK, maybe just leveraging the Space as a backing store would be OK too.
So that brings me to another thought: Why the tiny 10MB limit? I’d be a lot more excited with 200GB. And if I could programmatically interact with Spaces I’d be trying something right now rather than blogging this. That’s all right. Things need to come in stages. Increasing the storage space by a magnitude would be one.
All of this is getting off the blogging path. When I saw MSN Spaces one of the first things that came to mind–other than posting an ink message–was leveraging it as the Space of Choice while we’re at CES. This was my instantaneous dream: I’d like to be able to post photos from the floor using my Tablet webcam while we walk around and see things and/or meet people. Of course, I’m thinking of inking captions at times or circling things in the photos. Some of the photos are blog posts, not photos that look good as 1×1″ thumbnails.
Because of the componentized layout of Spaces I also thought about being able to “upload a map” into a custom cell that shows where we are in Vegas or the show room floor. Maybe the information would come from a GPS or maybe from a custom floorplan app I’ve been contemplating. Either way, I think it would be cool if I could programmatically post graphical content into a custom block. Seems like Spaces could treat it like a standard image. HTML control would be nice, of course though. What if I could program hot spots on the image so if someone clicks in the map a specific post would come up or the Spaces could switch to a slide show that corresponded to where I was at that time?
After all this dreaming I was getting sleepy and went to bed. That’s as far as I got.
Overall, MSN Spaces is a nice start. I don’t see myself moving this blog to MSN, but maybe some other features–such as photo sharing–will encourage me to use MSN in other blogging-like ways. Uh, but please, let’s see some ink 🙂
I agree, it totally raises the bar and while it doesn’t address Ink posting, It does change how we think of sharing photo’s and information in general, and really changes use experiences on the web.I uploaded 100 tablet pc pictures and still have 7MB Space left, so am not too worried about space. I think it works well for pictures I want to share,In any case if you have 500 photos in your Msn space I doubt that I will look at most of them,but if you have 20 I might
Yeah, maybe for most photo sets the 10MB limitation isn’t much of a limitation at all.
Sounds like what are describing is sort of a SharePoint Personal version. I can see Spaces reusing a lot of SharePoint functionality. I really need an alternative to Yahoo Briefcase in addition to a blog, email, etc. Give me a place to share files with a select group while leaving my blog public.