Windows Live Spaces announces features

The next version of Microsoft's Spaces hosted blogging product will include more social networking, gadget integration, and premium options such as no advertising on your blog. The features were announced tonight in a post on the Spaces team blog.

Spaces has a whole new look (pictured above) with cleaner lines and additional featured content than current spaces blogs. Your IM friends list can be exposed as a blog module showing off all their latest content and online activity. You can add the same gadgets to your blog sidebar that run on the Live.com personal homepage. The new site also makes it easier to navigate your categories and entries, exposing more content to your site visitors to encourage them to stay a while and get to know more about your digital content.

The biggest surprise is the addition of a Windows Live premium account with special features for Mail and Spaces users. Twenty bucks a year gives you more storage space in your online mail and removes advertisements from your blog as well as from Windows Live Mail. Yahoo! offers a premium mail service for $20 that is limited to just the mail property.

Posted at 9:19PM

Updated at 9:22PM

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1 Comments

Mark Papadakis on June 24, 2006 at 12:17 AM wrote: #

An interesting, and welcome, move from Microsoft Web folks. The blogging services providers arena is crowded enough, providing enough friction for new cool things to happen. Google's blogger.com has been surprisingly quiet and still for sometime now, while others are evolving by either offering more and better features and/or revising their business strategy (pay vs free ). I wonder how they and when they are going to react, for Blogger is in dire need for some architectural updates (the word out is that they are really unreliable and 'slow' nowadays ). In the meantime, SixApart is getting all the attention, all the money and all the users. Do you know if there is some sort of statistics that demonstrate each of the major provider's dominance over the other in terms of blogs hosts by it?

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Mark Papadakis on June 24, 2006 at 12:17 AM wrote: #

An interesting, and welcome, move from Microsoft Web folks. The blogging services providers arena is crowded enough, providing enough friction for new cool things to happen. Google's blogger.com has been surprisingly quiet and still for sometime now, while others are evolving by either offering more and better features and/or revising their business strategy (pay vs free ). I wonder how they and when they are going to react, for Blogger is in dire need for some architectural updates (the word out is that they are really unreliable and 'slow' nowadays ). In the meantime, SixApart is getting all the attention, all the money and all the users. Do you know if there is some sort of statistics that demonstrate each of the major provider's dominance over the other in terms of blogs hosts by it?

Windows Live Spaces announces features