After almost 3 years of blogging on Windows Live Spaces, none of the nagging problems with the service have been resolved. While other platforms such as Blogger and WordPress have continuously improved, Spaces has not received any significant updates since its inception. Due to the service’s decline, I have ported my Windows Live Space to this website.
Windows Live Spaces has not always been the outdated service it is today. When it was originally released back in 2004, it had a competitive feature set. As a cornerstone of Windows Live, Spaces, rather than the activity feed, served as a user’s profile. Several years of inattention later, Spaces is nonfunctional in comparison to other platforms.
Following the Windows Live Wave 4 reveal, even the most dedicated Windows Live users have expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of updates to Spaces. Spaces is plagued with comment and private messaging spam. Rather than integrating a spam filter in the latest round of Wave refreshes, the Windows Live team decided to cut corners and limit the maximum comment length instead, effectively discouraging commenting. They were clearly aware of the PM spam problem, and now users who are not networked with somebody cannot sent that individual a PM. How they failed to see that the obvious alternative tactic of friend request spamming would immediately be employed is amusing. Needless to say, the addition of sorely needed core features such as integrated tagging, readable URLs, anonymous commenting and tracking were not added.
Like many other Windows Live projects, Spaces started off strong until inattention to the product left it uncompetitive. Worst of all is the growing possibility that Windows Live Spaces could be discontinued in the near future. Wave 3 ended Spaces as the profile page of users and Wave 4 eliminated Spaces from the main navigation, suggesting a gradual marginalization of Spaces. In addition, all of the Windows Live teams have stopped blogging on Spaces, opting for WindowsTeamBlog.com instead. A recent post on the Windows Team Blog implied that they do not even see potential in blogging, suggesting that more frequent update style posts are becoming the norm.
I had hoped that Wave 4 would bring solid improvements to Spaces, but instead it has only confirmed my doubts about the service’s future. As a result, I recommend transferring Spaces blogs to WordPress.
If you are looking to export your Space, there is a third party Windows Live Spaces export tool which exports all blog posts and dates into a WordPress compatible XML file. My export and subsequent import into WordPress 3.0 went flawlessly. The only issue is that it does not export post times or comments, so these will need to be transferred manually.
Windows Live Spaces could have been another great Windows Live offering, but now it’s just another service that might be phased out.
This is a really good post Crestwind. Yes we are all disheartened about it all. Have you now closed your accounts down on Windows Live? And thanks for the tip about porting your older blogs to WordPress. I didn’t know that there was the ability to do so.
Thanks. I’ll still be using Windows Live, but I won’t be using Spaces anymore.
Crestind, you have covered this well. As you are aware, there is a subset of Spaces users at Office Live Small Business. We embed RSS feeds of our blogs on our OLSB websites as part of the customer/visitor experience. OLSB is another Microsoft service suffering inattention. The crippling of Spaces has caused even more damage to OLSB. Thus, I have moved both the blog and the weather site to Blogger. I do miss the sense of community that formerly existed at Spaces. My home page there has become a dead zone. Now, we need to find a way to keep in touch. Good luck to you.