May 07
Stay in touch with friends and meet new people with Guestbook and Messaging on Spaces
Spaces has always been a great place to express yourself and share the stuff you care about with your friends or the world at large, but there haven’t been that many options to communicate with people through your space. There are lots of ways to passively connect you’re your friends –Windows Live Messenger gleam integration, the Friends feature, and the What’s New feature which has now been incorporated into the Spaces Home, but in this release we really focused on giving you active ways to communicate with your friends and the people who visit your space through our new Guestbook and Messaging features. We know you’ve been asking for these features for a long time (particularly the Guestbook!), and we’re glad that we can finally deliver them.
More information about these features is listed below – as always we love it when you left us comments and let us know what you think.
Guestbook
The Guestbook is a brand new module that you can add to your Space through the Customize menu or by clicking the “+” sign on a Guestbook in someone else’s space:
Once you add the Guestbook module to your space (new spaces have it by default) you can add a custom greeting, which can include formatting, images, and even videos:
Visitors to your space can then leave and view comments in your guestbook (they can use images, video, and formatting too):
You can embed an image or video in a guestbook comment (or the greeting) by using the HTML mode of the text editor. Click the <HTML> link in the editor toolbar to access HTML mode:
Once you are in HTML mode you can paste in the embed code for a video on a site like Soapbox or YouTube or you can type in the html tag for an image (<img src=”Image URL”> where Image URL is the URL for the image on the web).
If you want a Guestbook on your space but you don’t want people to be able to use rich formatting, images, and videos in the comments you can turn this feature off in the Guestbook Settings page (while editing your space click on Options, then select Guestbook Settings in the left navigation pane). You can also adjust the number of comments that appear at one time in your Guestbook from here.
Messaging
Where the Guestbook is a great place for public communication the new Messaging feature is a great way to meet people on spaces or use it to stay in touch with your Spaces Friends. With Spaces messaging you can send private messages to your spaces friends or other spaces users without revealing you email address to others or having to using an outside e-mail service.
You can access your messaging inbox from the Spaces Home by clicking on the “Messages” link:
On your messages page you can view and delete messages you’ve received and sent, and you can reply to these messages:
There are lots of ways you can initiate a new conversation through Spaces messaging. If you are visiting a cool space you can click send a message from the visitor tools on that person’s space:
You can also click the “Send a message” link at the bottom of a blog post to send that person a message referring to the post:
Finally you can move your cursor over anyone’s profile picture and you’ll see “Send a Message”. This is an easy way to send a message to your Spaces friends (from the Friends module), someone whose space you are checking out, or someone who left a cool comment on a blog entry, photo or guestbook.
If you don’t check your space very often or you want to get notifications every times someone sends you a message you can set your communication preferences to send you an email when you get a new message. You’ll know when people are trying to get in touch with you on your space. You can turn this feature by editing your space, clicking on options, and then selecting “Communication preferences” in the left navigation pane:
We hope you like the new Guestbook and Messaging features and that they help you meet cool new people and stay in touch with your friends. If you have any feedback or suggestions for future improvements please leave us a comment!
- Mike, Sabina, Eileen, Vishal, Wendy, Jeff, Bob, and Joe
The Guestbook and Messaging feature teams
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