The Space Craft

I'm both excited and a bit nostalgic to be writing this blog entry letting our users know that The Space Craft (the official Spaces Team blog), is merging with the Windows Live team blog.

In some ways, this is a formalization of changes that started years ago as the team that built MSN Spaces expanded and partnered with other teams to help build Windows Live web services including Home, Profile, Photos, Events, Groups, and of course Spaces. ;)

For Spaces fans, here’s a quick history of our service:

• MSN Spaces launched in fall/winter 2004-2005 with support for blogs, photos, and lists. It was also integrated with MSN Messenger so that when a friend posted new content, a green star ("gleam") would show next to that person's name.
• In January 2006, support was added for searching Spaces, people, and blogs with the help of the (then MSN) Search team. (I joined the Spaces team in March of 2006.)
• In summer 2006, we added friend lists, and a host of other modules, redesigned the Spaces home page, and re-branded as Windows Live Spaces. In some ways, this was the launch of Windows Live 1.0.
• A bit over a year later in fall 2007, we launched Windows Live Events and a revised Spaces home page that included What’s New with your network and big improvements in our photo sharing experience. This broad release might be deemed Windows Live 2.0.
• As we embarked on planning for “Windows Live 3.0,” we expanded our team’s mission to include not just Spaces but also the friend/network experience, profiles, “What’s new,” permissions, groups, and Windows Live Writer.
• Most recently, starting with web release in December 2008 we shipped a bunch of new services, including:
  •  Windows Live Groups
  • Network invitations and friend suggestions
  • Web activities
  • New privacy and permissions controls

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Windows Live team blog, it is a fantastic resource for everything that is happening on Windows Live and is available at: http://WindowsLiveWire.spaces.live.com/. There is also an RSS feed and you can use Windows Live Alerts to subscribe via email, IM, or SMS.

• Twitter - You can also “follow” WindowsLive on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WindowsLive or TXT “follow WindowsLive” to 40404 in the USA, 21212 in Canada, or +44 7624 801423 in other locales.
• Facebook - You can become a fan of Windows Live Messenger and also add the Windows Live Messenger Facebook application.

Whether you view the blog on the web, follow Windows Live on Twitter, or any combination, I hope you’ll take a minute to connect with the Windows Live team. In addition, many of our team members including Chris, Eric, Joe, Michelle, and me will be continuing to blog about our work on Spaces and the rest of the Windows Live web services on Windows Live team blog. See you there. ;)

Thanks much—
- Rob Dolin
Program Manager, Windows Live team

Hey everyone,

In case you didn’t see the post on the Windows Live team blog, we made a change to the Spaces header last night as a direct result of the feedback that we received from you in the blog comments and the Feedback page.

For more information, check out the Windows Live team blog.

Thanks.   Please keep the feedback coming!

-Chris

There have been a number of questions about the new version of Windows Live web services over the past two days. We really appreciate the feedback and will be taking it into account as we plan and build future versions. We’ve taken some of the most frequently asked questions and answered them here.

Top 5 questions:

Why did I have problems accessing Windows Live pages yesterday, including Spaces, Profile, and Photos?

Yesterday some users intermittently got errors when they tried to access Windows Live web pages. We tracked the problem down to a load issue with some of our DNS servers, and the problem was resolved at around 1:00 PM PST. We’re sorry that some of you had problems accessing our sites, and we want to reassure you that we take the availability of our service very seriously. We’re constantly working to improve the quality and availability of our service – we want you to be able to rely on our service.

What is the story with privacy?

• The privacy and security of your information is a top priority for us, and we want to assure you that we haven’t done anything that changes any of the privacy settings you’ve put in place. We have made changes that allow information you’ve already entered to be shared more easily across Windows Live. This means information you’ve entered is showing up in many more places and can make it look more public than it was before. But, the key thing is that the privacy settings you put in place when you first entered that information are still being honored.
• It’s important to note that your view of your own profile typically shows more information than visitors will see.  For example, you will see your last name on your profile if you’ve entered it before, but unless you’ve explicitly changed the permissions on it, then other people won’t see it when they visit your profile.  This principle holds true throughout Windows Live – people will always (and only) see the content that they have permissions to view.  See this blog post on Windows Live Wire for pictures that show how this works.
• To help address any confusion, the blog post on Windows Live Wire shows you where you can view and edit your permissions, as well as step-by-step instructions you can follow to protect your information the way you want.

How do I keep comments I make from showing up in what’s new?

One of the great things about the updated what’s new system is that it shows the comments your friends left so you can see what’s interesting in the network and join in on the conversation. If you don’t want your comments to show up in what’s new, however, you can go to this page and uncheck the items for Blog, Documents, Guestbook, Notes, Photos, and Shared Favorites. This will turn off all of the what’s new updates you generate for those services, including comments. Keep in mind, turning off the what’s new updates doesn’t prevent someone from going to the item in question and seeing the comment – anyone who can access a blog post, photo, file, etc. can see any comments left on it.

How do you get to your space?

Your Windows Live space is still at the same URL as before (for example: http://thespacecraft.spaces.live.com/).   If you forgot your web address, there are two easy ways to get there:

• Click “Profile” in the header, and then click “Space” in the left-hand navigation area.
• Or, click “More” in the header, then click “Spaces.” On the Spaces page, click the big “View your space” icon near the top. Also, you can always go directly to http://spaces.live.com/ and click “View your space” from there.

How do I get to someone else’s space?

When you are looking at the person’s display picture click on their name to go to their profile, then click on “Space” in the left hand column on their profile (if there is no listing for “Space” that means they don’t have a space). You can find someone in your network on the People page, and you can search for people outside your network.

Privacy questions:

How do I make my photo album, profile details, space, etc. completely private?

When you are editing the permissions for something you can uncheck all of the boxes or click the “Clear these settings” link and then click “Save.” This will make it so only you can access that item.

Are my private messages now visible to everyone? OR What is the Notes feature on my profile?

The private messages (previously called “Messages” in Spaces) you send and receive are NOT public – only you and the person you sent them to can see them. We have introduced a new feature called Notes that lets you leave a public message on someone’s profile. This is a separate feature from Private messages – your private messages are still just between you and the person you are talking with. You can choose who can send you private messages on this page. You can change who can view your notes and who can leave you notes by going to your notes page and clicking “Edit permissions.”

Comment questions:

How do I see recent comments on my stuff?

We’ve built a brand new Recent Comments page, which shows you up to 50 comments made in the last 30 days on your blog, guestbook, photos, and files, as well as notes left on your profile. You can reach this page from the Spaces home page, or from the Windows Live Home page (on the right hand side click the “Do more” link and choose “View recent comments”). You can filter the comments on this page to show you all of your comments, just comments on your space, just photo comments, or photo and file comments.

What have you been doing to reduce comment spam?

We recognize that comment, invitation, and private messaging spam has been a real problem recently. In this release we’ve added a number of anti-spam measures behind the scenes. We don’t want to go into detail about how these measures work, as any information we provide may help spammers out. So far we have seen a significant decrease in the amount of spam in the last 2 days since the release, but we recognize that fighting spam and abuse is an ongoing battle, and we will be continuing to invest in methods to prevent and remove spam and abuse from our network.

Why don’t I have more formatting options for my comments?

In the previous version of Spaces you could use bold, italics, underlines, and hyperlinks in all comments. In guestbook comments, if the owner of the guestbook allowed it, you had much richer formatting options including HTML editing. For regular comments we found that the usage of formatting (other than hyperlinks) was very, very low, and supporting these formatting options made all of the pages that included comments slower to load. In order to improve performance we removed the ability to use bold, italics, and underlines in regular comments. You can still add a hyperlink to your comment – just type the URL in your comment and when you submit the comment it will automatically get fixed up into a clickable URL. If you’ve enabled rich formatting in your guestbook comments we still offer the full range of formatting options, including bold, italic, and underline. If you would like to add an image to your guestbook comments, you can drag a selection over the image in another website and paste it directly into the comment field.

Why are some of the comments on my blog, guestbook, photos, or files missing?

One of the features we built in this release was the ability for you to delete your own comments (great if you notice a typo after you submit your comment and want to delete and resubmit it). We’ve seen some reports that people are “missing” comments that were actually deleted by the people that left them.

Spaces questions:

Why are the spaces statistics not updating?

As part of our release process we have to update a lot of different components. The statistics servers take longer to update than the rest of our servers, which is why you are seeing zero new page views in your statistics since we released. Once the statistics servers finish updating in the next few days your statistics will be available again. In the mean time we are still tracking page views and those page views will be included when the statistics servers are fully updated – you won’t “lose” any page views in this process.

How do I change back to the old Spaces font?

We changed the default font on Spaces to be more readable and consistent with other services on Windows Live.  If you don’t like this change, you can customize your space to use the old font.

Why does BlogIt on a Spaces blog post not quote the original post in my new post?

When we updated our APIs to make them more compliant with web standards we ended up having to reduce the number of quoted characters in the BlogIt function. When clicking BlogIt on short posts you will still have the post quoted in your post, but for longer posts we end up dropping the post body. We know that this is less than ideal, and we’re investigating ways to improve this experience in future releases.

What’s new questions:

How do I remove one of my updates from what’s new?

You can remove updates from what’s new by going to your profile, hovering on the update you want to remove, clicking the “gear” icon to the right of the update, and selecting “Remove this update”.

How do I stop receiving what’s new updates from a specific person?

You can block what’s new updates from a specific person or updates of a specific type from your Home page.  Hover on an update from the person you want to block, click the “gear” icon to the right of the update, and choose to hide updates from that person or that type of update. Or you can go to this page and add a person to your block list or uncheck a type of update that you no longer want to receive.

Miscellaneous questions:

Why can’t I reorder the photos in my albums?

Unfortunately we had to cut reordering photos in albums and reordering photo albums from our feature list. These were two of the features we wanted to have in the new photos experience, and we are considering adding these features in a future release.

Why don’t some of my friends are show up in my network?

A very small number of people are affected by this issue, which will be fixed in the near future. As part of our update we are running a migration job on everyone’s friends list. If you added someone to your friends list between November 20th and December 2nd it is possible that that person will not show up in your network. We are completing our friends list migration by December 15th,  and at that time any missing friends should be back in the list of people in your network. If there are people missing from your network that were added before November 20^th please let us know us know by leaving a comment.

How do I turn off e-mail notifications when someone sends me an invitation?

You can change your communication preferences, including who can send you an invitation and whether you get e-mail notifications on this page. You can get to this page by going to any Options page (from the options menu on every page), choosing “Windows Live” in the left hand navigation, and then clicking “Communications preferences.”

Why do some people have “No name” as their name?

If you’re seeing “No name”, it means that person hasn’t put a name into Windows Live. We’ve built a number of notifications into Windows Live that encourage people to set their name, so as time goes on you should see fewer and fewer of these “No name” people. You can change your name on this page. We also had a temporary problem (now fixed!) during the early hours of this release that made some people appear as “No name” even when they had a name. If you see others that have “No name,” encourage them to go to that link and change their name. Your name will appear on your profile and anywhere else in Windows Live where your identity is shown.

How do I delete a friend?

You can delete a friend from your People page, which you can access by clicking the People link in the header of most pages. On the main people page, select the checkbox of the person you’d like to delete and then click “Delete” from the action links at the top.

The updates to Spaces, SkyDrive, and Events, as well as the brand new Profile, Groups, and Photos experiences have just been released. We can’t wait for you to try them out!

We’ll be talking in more depth about all of the cool new stuff in the coming weeks, and we’ll be answering a list of frequently asked questions later this week. But if you want more info about the release, you can check out these blog posts:

• The pre-release announcement on the Windows Live team blog and our announcement here on The Space Craft
• The web release post on the Windows Live team blog, which provides details about the new header, the Home page, the new Photos experience, the new Profile, Groups, Events, and SkyDrive
• Our in-depth post about the updates to Spaces
• Details about “what’s new” and “web activities,” which help you keep in touch and up-to-date with what your friends are up to
• The full scoop on the new Profile page
• A breakdown of all the cool new stuff in SkyDrive over on the SkyDrive team blog

This is an incredibly exciting release for us, and we really hope you enjoy all of the new experiences. Check it out, and let us know what you think in the comments!

- The Windows Live team

P.S. Updates to other services, including the Windows Live Home page, will be rolling out soon.

In the past few posts we’ve mentioned the new profile that we’re shipping in our upcoming release, but today’s the day that we give you the full scoop!

Profiles will be the center of Windows Live

Your profile will be the place for people to see what is going on with you, to communicate with you, and to see the content you are sharing. It’s also your way to express yourself. You can choose from a variety of themes, share what you’re doing online (both on Windows Live and on other websites) in your what’s new feed, and get to all of of the things you’ve posted on Windows Live – your photos, files, space, and profile details. If you want to add someone to your network or communicate with them, either through private messages or by posting a note for everyone to see, the profile will be the best place to do it.

Your profile will use the existing information you’ve filled out for your space’s profile – there’s no need to re-enter anything. So if you’ve already added a profile picture, interests, a self description, or any other profile information it will still be there.

Let’s talk about the different parts of your profile:

• The top of the profile will highlight your theme, profile picture, name, status message, occupation, and location. Many of the new Windows Live themes (like the one shown below) will be dynamic, reflecting the time of the day and the weather in your current location. You can see that it’s kind of cloudy and gloomy in Seattle right now, but it’s not raining!
  
• In the left hand column there will be links to the content that you’ve shared, including photos, files, and your space.
• Beneath that will be the profile details you’ve shared, including your self-summary, interests, birthday, and contact information. Don’t worry, you decide who gets to see this information. In fact, you decide who has permission to see your stuff in Windows Live, from photos, to your space, to your favorite music.
• Under the profile details will be the list of web activities you’ve added to your profile. If you use another website, like Flickr, Pandora, or Twitter, you can add it to your Windows Live profile. Every time you make an update on one of those other sites it’ll show up in your what’s new feed. It’s a great way to share all of the things you do online in one place.
  
• Speaking of what’s new, your recent activity will be front and center on the profile page. Your friends can quickly catch up on what you’ve been up to, and all you need to do is just keep doing the things you normally do online. You can see below that Joe has added a favorite book, uploaded a Word document, shared some photos, and left some comments on photos and blog posts in the past few weeks:
  
• The profile will be a great place to get in touch and communicate with people. You’ll be able to send an e-mail or private message from a persons profile, or post a note on their profile if you want your friends to see what you’ve said:
  
• At the top of the right-hand column of your profile there will be a list of the people in that your network. When someone visits your profile they’ll see a list of the people you both know:
  
• Finally, there will be a special section where you can show the world, or just your friends, the books, music, and movies you really care about, called favorite things:
  

We’re really excited about the new profile, as well as the rest of Windows Live, and we can’t wait to release it to the world. Let us know what you think in the comments.

- The Windows Live team