Almost two weeks ago, Chris blogged about the new features in our latest release.  In the next few weeks, some of the team members who worked on these new features will have the chance to tell their stories and talk about the features they worked-on. 

I’m excited to get the opportunity to kick this off by talking about our new “Spaces home.”  Our goal for this page was to give you a personalized starting place to explore Spaces, including recent updates from your contacts, recent comments on your blog, entry points to customize your space, and tips on how to get the most out of Windows Live Spaces.

We’re continuing to improve the “Spaces home” so please leave a comment if you have a suggestion for how we could make this even better.

As you probably know, you can get to the “Spaces home” by going to http://spaces.live.com and clicking “sign in” in the top right.  When you get there, you’ll see a number of modules with different information:

Mirror module

The mirror module is all about you.  At the top, it shows your profile picture and display name.  Below is a link to edit these; and below that is a link to go to your space in edit mode.  The next section is for “Pending Requests” and “Messages.”  Below that is a quick summary of your statistics showing how many page views there were on your space today and in the past hour.  You can click these to go to the full page view of statistics.  Finally, there are entry points to edit the content on your space and Add friends. 

Welcome module

Since this new “home” page was a pretty big change from how Spaces previously worked, where users were take straight to their space in author mode, we thought it would be good to temporarily have a “welcome” module that explained the page and suggested some things you can do with your space.  At some point over the next few weeks, this module will disappear and the What’s New feed will move up to the top of the page.

What’s new module

IMHO, this is really where the action is.  One of the reasons I personally use social networking, blogging, and RSS readers is to stay in touch with people close to me (family, friends, even an occasional co-worker J)  This module shows up to 10 of your Messenger contacts who recently updated their spaces.  You can hover on someone to quickly see their two most recent updates (and have an entry point to send them a message) or click on them to navigate to their space.  There’s also a link in the lower left to add contacts and a link in the lower right to go to the "What's new" page (see below).  

BTW, the little yellow stars (“gleams”) indicate if you’ve visited that person’s space (or viewed their contact card) since they made their last update.

What’s new page

If you have more than 10 friends who frequently update their Space (and hopefully you do J) you can click the “More” link in the lower right to see up to 100 recently updated Spaces from your Messenger contacts:

Recent comments module

Back on the Spaces home, below the What’s New module is the Recent comments module.  Here you can see up to 10 recent comments on your blog (instead of just the 5 you see on the blog module.)  You also get the first ~30 characters of the comment.  You can click on a person’s name to go directly to their space and click on the comment to go to that comment. 

Education module

Finally, there’s the product education module where you can learn more about Spaces features and also click the header (“Spaces Central”) to get back to the non-personalized home page with tons of general Spaces info, featured spaces, and more.  This module rotates through information about new features and contests.  Below are some screenshots of what you might see:

Thanks for your interest in the Spaces home.  I hope you’ll enjoy using the new Spaces home as a starting point to exploring Windows Live Spaces and leave a comment if you have suggestions for further improvements.—

--The “Spaces home” team (Rob, Deepa, Khalid, Becky, Prathi, Duane, Kirsten, Todd)