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 . . .

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