Windows Live Spaces

Reviewed by

Elsa Wenzel

on 08/02/2006

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The Customize link brings you to options for quickly adding Gadgets and personalizing the appearance of your public Space.

Similar to the third-party plug-ins offered by Yahoo Messenger with Voice 8, Windows Live Spaces embraces Gadgets that broaden the scope of functions and interactivity afforded by this blogging tool. It's neat that Windows Live lets you add stock quotes, weather, and horoscope modules to your Space, in addition to the blog and photo gallery added to your page by default. You can visit gallery.live.com for a list of the latest Gadgets. These dynamic tools include games such as Hangman or Feed the Snake, RSS feeds, and shopping. During our initial tests, most of the Gadgets were available only to add to our Live.com private home page and not yet to display at our public Spaces Web site. As Gadgets are built by Microsoft and by third-party developers, expect the list to grow.

It's a no-brainer to drag and drop the content modules and rearrange them on your Space, but we wish that we could resize them, too. The Space Contents module offers quick links to your goods. Windows Live Spaces lets you add a reading list or a music playlist either by exporting songs from Windows Media Player or by typing in tunes one by one. However, MySpace, the preferred social networking tool among musicians and other artists, already provides more multimedia offerings, such as streaming songs and videos. We expect Spaces to attempt to catch up in this area. Added interactivity includes the ability to let people comment on your pictures. You can upload up to 500 photos a month and display a rotating slide show on your home page.

The polished-looking pages of Windows Live Spaces don't have the grassroots, DIY flavor enabled by more-sophisticated blogging services, such as TypePad. And we had a hard time finding parody profiles on Spaces, such as our "pimp squirrel" pal whom we knew and loved on Friendster. You can check the Windows Live Spaces site for selected users' Spaces, which include corporate-built Spaces, such as a community for women's home improvement.

Windows Live Spaces support offerings include a searchable knowledge base and a table of contents. You can click Get More Help to e-mail tech support with a question or to give Microsoft a piece of your mind.

All kinds of Web-based services are becoming more dynamic, enabling social networking and customization. Now that Microsoft is embracing this Web 2.0 technology and serving it for free to a global user base, we're curious to see how Windows Live Spaces will evolve.