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

As promised last week, we’re going to talk in more detail about the exciting changes coming to Windows Live, and we figured we should start with the product you’re using right now, Windows Live Spaces.

More freedom to do what you want

Let’s start off with the most visible change: we’re removing the horizontal ad from your space!

Your space is all about your content, the way you want to show it, so we’re reducing the amount of clutter and giving you more freedom by:

• Removing the horizontal ad from the top of your space
• Making all of the modules optional (even the Title and Tagline module, which previously couldn’t be removed)
• Using a simpler header that has less text than other pages in Windows Live
• Letting you change themes, fonts, colors, and background images on your space using the customize menu
• Letting you rename or not show the title of each module on your space by using the settings menu for each module in customize mode
• Letting you select exactly which photo albums to show in your photos module – you can even customize what parts of the photos interface to display

(These last three are features that we’ve already implemented and are available today in Spaces)

Better looking pages

We’re also making some additional small changes to make your space look even better. One of the things we’ve done is to improve the typography on your space by using a larger, more readable default font, Segoe UI. It’s a subtle change, but it really helps make your content easier to read. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of our post from last week with the current font and with the new default font:

(Current version on left, new version on right)

We’re also doing a better job of differentiating titles from normal text by using different size text instead of relying on bold versus plain text. Of course, if you prefer the old font you can customize your space to use the old font (when we release the new update, we won’t override any font selections you’ve already made).

There’ll also be a couple of theme changes, mainly to the header and background images, that make things look a bit simpler, cleaner, and more attractive. The most obvious of these is that we’re getting rid of the 3D “bevel” in the header and moving to solid colors or unobstructed background images. You can see this in the comparison screenshot below:

(Current version on top, new version on bottom)

Don’t worry, these theme changes won’t break your layout or change the way your modules look – they’ll only affect the header and background images.

Improved blogging experience (especially with photos)

Blogging with photos will get even better with the next update. About a year ago we fixed the Add Photos button in blogs on Internet Explorer so your photos were inserted inline in your blog entry, which let you move them around, place them exactly where you wanted, and generally make your blog entries more attractive and appealing. With this release all browsers will be able to insert images inline, and you won’t need to install our upload tool in order to insert images. If you do install the tool, however, you’ll get a rich, drag and drop upload experience that makes inserting images from your computer, or from a photo album you already have on Windows Live, a snap.

We also built a great new photo preview that you’ll see when you click on a photo in a blog entry. Instead of opening up a new window with a larger version of the image, the current page will show a beautiful preview of the original size image (or as much as can fit on your screen):

In the coming days we’ll continue to blog about all of the cool stuff in the next release. We hope you’re as excited about it as we are. As always, please let us know what you think in the comments.

- The Windows Live team

We wanted to let you know that we had a small release to Spaces today.

The primary change in this release was that you can now include Messenger for the web as well as SkyDrive files in the Custom HTML module using embed codes.  

In addition, we also made some changes to the infrastructure of Spaces to make the service faster and more reliable.

We hope you enjoy the changes.   Keep giving us the feedback.  We are listening.

- Chris
Product Manager, Windows Live

First, thanks again for all of your feedback. There's nothing like receiving comments and ideas directly from some of our 115 million monthly Spaces users worldwide. 

Based on what we've heard from you, here's the latest round of changes we've made:

• You now have the ability to remove updates from specific people in the what's new area of your Spaces home page. 

At the bottom of your (signed-in) Spaces home page, you now have an “Options” link. 

Clicking “Options” will take you to a “What’s new Options” page where you can choose who of your Spaces friends and Messenger contacts show up on your home page.

• We've added back your list descriptions for all lists when they are displayed in the narrow column
• The font for custom lists is no longer bold by default
• We changed the Sponsored Results module to reflect the transition of our partnership with Kanoodle
• We've made some additional smaller changes which you won’t see but which will further improve the Spaces service

We hope you enjoy these changes.   As always, keep the feedback coming. We are listening.

- Chris
Product Manager, Windows Live

At the end of last week, we released some new features for Spaces and Windows Live Events. Here's the low-down:

New in Windows Live Spaces

Friends of your friends
When you're signed in and you visit another person's space, you can easily see the friends you have in common.

Multiple photo modules
More than 8 million photos are uploaded to Windows Live a day, so we figured you might like to have more ways to showcase your photos on your space. Now you can! Just add more than one photo album to your space from the Customize page.

Additional markets and additional storage for Windows Live SkyDrive 
In addition to the US, UK, and India, SkyDrive is now available to users in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Finland, France, Guatemala, Honduras, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Turkey.

In addition, SkyDrive users will also have more room for storing files because the limit is being raised from 1GB to 5GB.   So now you have five times the space you had before — that’s 5GB of free online storage for your favorite documents, pictures, and other files.   SkyDrive is a great way to make sure your files are available to you from any computer, without having to carry them around on a flash drive.  It is really useful for sharing files that may be too big to send in e-mail.

For Spaces users in the countries above, you will see a link on your Spaces home page which will allow you to upload files directly from Spaces to Windows Live SkyDrive.   Just click on the Share Files link at the top of the Spaces home page.

You can also learn more by visiting the SkyDrive team blog.

New in Windows Live Events

We added new features to Events to make it more personal. When you create an event on Windows Live, your own name and e-mail address appears on the invitation instead of the automatically generated e-mail address. In addition, any public events you organize will show up in your Windows Live profile and Events homepage so your friends and Messenger contacts will know when and where it's happening.

As always, let us know your thoughts and keep sending us your feedback.   We are listening.

-Chris
Product Manager, Windows Live

Today we released Windows Live Events, as well as some Spaces updates. Now planning get-togethers, keeping in touch with friends and family, and sharing photos are much easier. Plus, we’ve added some of the top feature requests you’ve sent in to us over the past few months.

You can read about Events and the other updates below, and, as always, keep the feedback coming. We are listening!

-Chris Keating and Jay Fluegel
Product Managers, Windows Live

Easily create a great-looking website for your next event To offer you more ways to connect and share memories with the people you care about most, the team that brought you Spaces would love to hear your feedback on Windows Live Events, our new, free social event planning service.  With Events you can easily: Plan that next baby shower, birthday party, or family reunion Create a great-looking event invitation and website using one of over 100 fantastic templates Invite anyone with an e-mail address and track who’s coming Make your event unique with familiar customization features - choosing a friendly web address (like http://kates1stbirthday.events.live.com), using custom colors, fonts, and background images, or adding modules and Windows Live web gadgets Let guests and organizers share photos and stories before and after the event Click on Events from the new navigation and then click Create event to get started!
Share photos and stories after the party’s over Ever notice that your guests take more and better pictures at your parties than you do because you’re focused on everyone having a good time?   And, if you remember to even ask, there is a mad scramble afterwards to try to collect everyone’s photos over e-mail.  Well, we want to make that A LOT easier with features like: Photo album creation by the event organizer AND any of the guests Stunning full-screen photo slideshows Ordering prints through our partner, HP Snapfish One-click download of a photo album into Windows Live Photo Gallery After the event, return to the event website and click Add album in the Photos module to share those photos! In addition to making it easy for everyone to share photos after the party, Windows Live Events allows guests to share memories in other ways, including a discussion board, guestbook, and sharing videos you upload to Soapbox on MSN Video or other popular video sharing sites.
Works great with other Windows Live services Like Spaces, Events works really well with Windows Live services you’re already familiar with. For example, while an invitation can be sent to any e-mail address, click Invite guests from the event website and quickly invite individuals and groups from your same contact list that’s available in Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger, and Spaces.

What’s new in What’s new

In today’s release, we also added some new features to the Spaces home page.  

• What’s new now shows more details about what your friends and Messenger contacts are doing online, including adding photos, files, new blog entries, profile updates, lists, and friends.
• Comments on your space now also includes photos and guestbook comments, in addition to blog comments.

For additional information on the new spaces home page, Rob Dolin, a Spaces Program Manager, has a detailed post on the new features here. 

Do more with your photos

With this release, we’ve made it easier to share photos using Spaces.

Here’s how:

• Let your friends know about new photos you’ve added to your space. Click Send a link and you’ll get a formatted e-mail with links to your album – just add your friends and family to the “To:” line and click Send.

• Put your photos and albums on other websites. Click Embed and then copy the web address or embed code and paste it into the appropriate location on the other site.
• Blog about your own or other people’s photos. Click Blog it and a new blog entry is created automatically with the photo already in the entry. Just add your thoughts and click Publish entry.
• No more downloading an entire album of photos one by one. Download all the photos in an album by clicking Download and then selecting Download album.
• Share photos from your space on Facebook (only in some markets where Facebook is available)
• For those wall-worthy shots, you can order prints online from HP Snapfish in 9 new markets including Australia, Belgium, France, Italy, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, and the UK.

Control who can see your albums

Want Mom to see the pictures from your hiking trip, but not the shots from your friend's birthday? No problem! Now you can choose who can see which albums on your space.

Just go to an album and click Edit album. You’ll see what the current permissions are for that album. To change them, click Change permissions. (By default, all albums are set to use the same permissions as your space.)

Add photos to your blog entries

You can now add and resize photos directly in your blog entries to make a richer experience for readers.

Note: If you want more options for editing your Spaces blog entries, download Windows Live Writer. It’s free, and it makes it easy to compose, edit, preview, and post entries to Windows Live Spaces.

Getting around Spaces – the new navigation

With this release, we removed the buttons for What’s new and Your space, and added additional links at the top of each page to make it easier to get to your Spaces home page and your space, as well as additional pages within your space.

We also added an icon on the right hand side of the navigation that links to the Spaces community page where you can find some of the most popular spaces and search for people that have similar interests.

Recent activity in your profile

Have you ever wanted a quick overview of what one of your friends has been up to recently? With our new and improved profile you can see the most recent updates to a space:  

• Recent activity shows recent blog posts, new photo albums, updates to lists, new files, and more.
• Friends and Profile lets you see who is in this person’s social network and quickly browse to their friends enhanced profile pages.

You can get to the new profile page for any space you have permission to view by clicking on “Profile” in the new navigation bar.

Print your blog entries for your personal keepsakes

You now have the ability to select from your Spaces blog entries and print them. We’ve partnered with HP, and the printouts look great.

Just go to any blog entry and click Print. Select the entries you want to print – the entries are automatically compiled into a document for easy printing.

Go crazy with customization

Customizing your space should be quick and fun – at least that’s what we heard in the feedback from the last release. Here’s what’s new:

• There are more ways to get into customize mode. Just click the icon at the top of any module to get into customize mode.  
• It’s faster to add modules, or change templates, themes, layouts, and colors. Just click Customize and select the action you want to take.
• It’s easier to find modules or gadgets to add to your space. Click Customize and then click Add modules —you’ll see all of them at a glance.

Posted with Windows Live Writer

We are in the process of releasing the new Windows Live Events service.   Please stay tuned over the next few days for the new service as well as a blog post here detailing all of the new Events and Spaces features.

If you are interested, the updates have been covered by some news organizations below:

• News.com
• Techcrunch
• Liveside.net

We look forward to releasing these new features for you to enjoy.

-Chris Keating
Product Manager, Windows Live

There were a few issues that were discovered in Spaces following our July 20^th release which we fixed with a minor update last week. Many of these issues were reported by you here on the Space Craft and we wanted to give you the heads up that they have now been fixed.

The update included fixes for the following problems:

• You can now use the Windows Media Player module in Invisible mode. Formerly if you set the display mode to Invisible it would prevent you from accessing your Space – this issue has now been resolved.
  
  
• In the HTML module you can once again hide the module background color as well as the header and border. To do so click the Customize button, then click on the triangle in the upper right hand corner of the HTML module, choose Preferences, and choose to Hide both the module header and the module border.
  
  
• We fixed the background colors for gadgets so that they will match your theme again.

We appreciate your feedback and continued use of Spaces, and we look forward to hearing from you in the comments.

- Chris
Product Manager, Windows Live Spaces

 We’ve got a really exciting opportunity to share. Windows Live Spaces, in partnership with MSN Live Earth  is organizing a road trip across America. We would love for you to be involved. Below is the ad that will be running online and in college newspapers papers across the country this Friday.

Here's your chance to score the ultimate summer job representing Microsoft! Voyage on an adventurous cross-country road trip from Seattle to NYC over 5 weeks while meeting folks from across the nation and doing your part to make the earth a better place to live. You will earn $5,000 and be given: money for meals and lodging, a 'souped-up' laptop, and a digital camera to chronicle your trip with Windows Live Spaces for the world to see. Your once in a lifetime trip will end with great seats to see the Live Earth concert on 07/07/07 at Giants Stadium.

To qualify for this position you must: be at least 21 years of age as of 5/15/07, be free and available to travel from 5/28/07 to 7/10/07, be comfortable riding bicycles through city streets, care about the planet, not pollute, love trees, know how to make people laugh, either know how to use the Internet or claim to have invented it, and be ready for the ride of your life!

To RSVP for an in-person casting call, please go to www.WindowsLiveSpacesRoadTrip.com and enter the required information no later than 5/15/07. Selected participants will be notified on or about 5/22/07.

Here are the details for the open casting calls:

Boston, MA - May 14th 10am-4pm
Hotel Commonweath 617.933.5000
500 Commonwealth Ave
Boston, MA  02215

New York, NY - May 15th - 10AM - 4PM
Mr. Youth Headquarters  212.779.8700
@ Chelsea Market
75 Ninth Avenue; 4th Floor
New York NY 10011

Chicago, IL - May 17th - 10AM - 4PM
Mike Ditka's Chicago: 312-587-8989
100 East Chestnut Street
Chicago IL 60611

Los Angeles, CA - May 18th - 10AM - 4PM
Omni Hotel: 213-617-3300
251 South Oliver Street
Los Angeles CA 90012

We'd love to see you there. If nothing else you'll get to come to Redmond and meet the team! The roadsters will shove off from Redmond on June 1st.

Best, Marty

Senior Product Marketing Manger

Imagine the possibilities: you are out with some friends, you take a photo on your mobile device and you upload it directly to a specified photo album in your space without missing a beat. We’ve now made it possible for you to instantaneously capture those moments and share them broadly and seamlessly from anywhere.

If you’re setting it up from your PC, simply visit the E-mail publishing options page, where you can select several secret keywords to help you to create a secure and unique address for each album on your space. Save these custom addresses to your phone’s address book to make sharing your memories even easier.

You can also enable photo publishing directly from your device if you are connected to the mobile internet. Simply go to http://mobile.spaces.live.com on your phone’s internet browser, select the album to which you would like to upload photos, and choose “Add photos.”

And of course, you can also use your mobile internet to check out your newly uploaded photos by navigating to http://mobile.spaces.live.com on your phone’s web browser.

Ready, set, snap! And of course, we’d love to hear what you think of the feature.

- Stephanie

p.s. Don’t forget that you can still post blog entries while on the go through e-mail publishing, too.

NOTE: You may be charged a fee by your mobile provider to upload photos to your space or otherwise access the internet through your mobile device. Check with your mobile provider to determine the applicable fees.

With the latest Spaces release on 11/8, we created the ability for users to install gadgets on their Space and add their own personal content directly into the gadgets.  This has had two great effects:

1) There are now a lot more great gadgets created specifically for Spaces users (see below)

2) It is now easier than ever for people to create gadgets, upload them to Gallery, and allow others to install and use them

In order to highlight the new cool gadgets that developers are creating for Spaces, we released a Spaces Gadgets page today linked to from the the Spaces home page.  The page highlights some of the top Spaces gadgets from the Windows Live Gadget Gallery.  

We will continue to add new and updated Spaces gadgets in order to make it easier and more fun to personalize your Windows Live Space and make it your own.

We also encourage you to try your hand at developing a gadget for Spaces.  It is easy to do based off of the information located here.  If your gadget is good enough, it might even be featured on the Spaces Gadgets page someday!

Sample Spaces Gadgets (click on the links to learn more)

1) Soapbox on MSN Video - This Soapbox video player was created by the Soapbox team specifically for Spaces.  It allows you to watch all the videos you've uploaded to Soapbox, the videos you've tagged as your favorites, as well as the most commented, popular and recent videos on Soapbox.  You can also add, edit and interact with a video. 

2) Universal Video Player - allows you to insert a video into your Space from any of the popular video sites on the web including Soapbox, Youtube, iFilm, Google Video, and more.

3) HTML Sandbox – enables you to place custom HTML inside of the gadget as a way to further customize your Space

4) Flickr RSS and Tag Slideshow – Showcase your favorite Flickr photos on your Space by easily adding an RSS feed or tags to the gadget. 

-Jay

Just a couple of hours ago we released an incremental update to Windows Live Spaces. Most of the work in this release occurred under the hood – improving performance, fixing bugs, and increasing usability – but we’ve also shipped a few cool new features in this release. We’ll talk in more detail about both the “behind the scenes” improvements and these new features in future posts, but for now we wanted to give you a quick recap of the new features you can use starting today.

What’s new with my contacts

The new What’s New section on the homepage helps you keep up to date with your friends. When one of your contacts updates their Space with new content their name, picture, and how long ago they updated their Space will appear on this page, letting you know that you should go check out their Space.

Music and Video aren’t just for power users anymore

Last summer we released the Windows Media Player module as an unsupported Power Toy so all of the expert users out there could add music and video to their Spaces. We’ve now converted it into a full-fledged module – no more messing with URL parameters to add a music player to your Space. You can find the Windows Media Player module under the Other category in the Customize menu.

Cover art in Music Lists

One of the neatest features of our Book lists is the ability to display the covers of the books you add to your list. But why stop at books? Starting today you can display the cover art for your albums in the Music list module and take advantage of Amazon integration to let your visitors find and buy your favorite music online (available in those markets where we have a music partnership with Amazon, including the US, UK, Germany, France, and Japan). You can add Album art to your existing Music lists by Editing and then Saving the entries you want album art added to.

Customize your colors

Users of the TweakUI Power Toy have been able to apply custom colors to their Spaces homepage for about a year now, but TweakUI has always had its shortcomings – it’s hard to use, your customizations only apply to your main Spaces page (not the blog page, or photos page, etc.), and its only available in the US. Well, you can kiss those usability issues goodbye – we’ve added the ability to change the colors in your Space through your Customize menu: simply pick your colors from a list or specify the color code you want to use.

Film buffs, this one is for you . . .

Tons of Spaces users like to display their favorite movies in Custom lists, but wouldn’t it be cool if you could display the cover art, link to trailers and show times, and include production information? Well, now you can using the new Movie List feature.

Gadget improvements

A lot of new gadgets have been written and released to the Windows Live Gallery since we added basic gadget support in August, which is awesome, but a pretty key gadget feature was not supported in Spaces until this moment – the ability to save your preferences! With this release of Spaces, however, we officially support the get and set preference methods, so gadgets that allow for user customization, like video and photo gadgets, will now work properly in Spaces. Head over to the gallery and try some of these gadgets out.

Even more customizations for your Space’s look and feel

Lots of Spaces users love being able to control the look and feel of their Space – and so do we! To help you personalize your Space even more we’ve released two new customization options – title and tagline customization and a new four column layout. You can now change the font, color, alignment, and size of your Space’s Title and Tagline through the Title and Tagline module – just click edit and a handy pop-over will let you customize to your heart’s content. You can access the four column layout through the Customize menu, under layouts. Oh – and you can also hide the Space Contents and Visitor Tools modules if you don’t want them to appear on your space.

We hope you like these new features and we’d love to hear what you think of them. Whether you love or hate these new features, leave us a comment and tell us what you’re thinking . . .

Posted with Windows Live Writer, the best way to post to your space. If you haven’t tried it yet, you’re missing out!

I was reading today that the Search team is doing some cool new stuff at http://beta.search.live.com.  I personally am really excited about the new “Scope bar” (or whatever they’re calling it lately) that lets you change your search from Web to Images, News, etc., and hopefully Spaces soon . 

• Spaces
• People
• Blogs

• site:spaces.live.com
• site:<your space alias>.spaces.live.com 
• meta:search.pt(spaces) – spaces front pages
• meta:search.pt(people) – spaces profiles
• meta:search.pt(blogs) – spaces blog entries

There have been some comments and questions about sorting of your Friends list.  Superstar Developer, John, has a recent post explaining how to do this:

Quote

Fine tune your friends order

As one of the developers that helped build the new Spaces Friends experience, I wanted to share an insiders tip on how you can fine tune the order your Friends appear in your Friends list. In the Edit Friend page near the top of the page, you can change the order Friends appear by choosing one of the following options:

 

• Near the top
• Near the bottom
• Doesn't matter

This makes it easy to quickly organize your friends, but it just does not provide the fine tuning some power users might want. So we provided an undocumented, super secret hack that will allow more precise control. Add a special tag.

sort:1

Any tag in this format (sort:x where x is a number) will allow fine tune control of where your friends appear. If you save the sort:1 tag on a friend you will notice that this friends becomes the very first person in your friends list. When you open the friend again, you will notice that the special tag (sort:1) does not appear in your tags list. The position is maintained until you override it, say with a different value: sort:10.