Windows Live Spaces

CNET editors' take

• Reviewed by:
  Elsa Wenzel
• Reviewed on: 08/02/2006

This update to MSN Spaces gets a streamlined new look and feel, which you can customize by picking colors or a template with backgrounds that show sports, puppies, hearts, and other themes. You must pay for a Premium account to remove the ad banner, which replaces the text ads from MSN Spaces.

MSN Spaces is now Windows Live Spaces, and it lets you add an ever-expanding array of novelty Gadgets alongside your blog and photo gallery.

Microsoft says there are about 120 million Spaces users. Unfortunately, if you already keep an MSN Spaces account, your URL will change with this upgrade (for example, to mypage.spaces.live.com from mypage.spaces.msn.com), but typing the old domain name will take you to the new one, and all of your content remains untouched.

Creating an account from scratch takes some time to get started. During setup, you can choose whether to make your profile public or to restrict viewing to trusted contacts. The Contact Info page lets you give away your birthday, home and business address, and significant other's vital stats, if you wish. We like that Windows Live's Permissions settings allow you to designate access to either the general public, to direct contacts or contacts with three degrees of separation, or to specific people. You can also designate who sees what on your Space--a lifesaver if you want to, earmark, say, your honeymoon photo album as boss-proof. Windows Live Spaces' Options page lets you syndicate your space, which will broadcast an RSS feed of your updates to the world at large. With just two mouse clicks, you can delete your space; but we'd like an extra step to keep us from making an accidental wipeout.

While there's a wealth of permissions options, in our tests, we didn't find these to be easy for grade-school kids to follow. Because a service like this one is likely to attract young users, we'd like a process that better spells out, in dead-simple language, the repercussions of broadcasting your identity to the world.

Microsoft wants Spaces to serve as a virtual crash pad for you and your friends, whose faces you can display on your page, à la Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook. Click a contact, and you can quickly chat by using Windows Live Messenger. The new Friends Explorer lets you check out people within your extended network. You can search for people by typing in a name, use Explore to check out people already connected to you, or look up keywords to find Spaces in an area of interest. We found 3,527 Spaces and 211 contact profiles that mentioned insects, for example. Within your list of contacts, and on a module of a world map, a little yellow star lights up to show when someone has updated his or her Space.

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Recent user reviews

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• Showing 2 of 2 user reviews

• 4.0 stars

  "Windows Live Spaces has a lot of potential."

  by goodjohn_2000 on November 1, 2007

• 2.0 stars

  2 out of 2 people found this helpful

  "Not very good"

  by brettmm on August 7, 2006

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