MSN turned on MSN Spaces last night and of course I had to set up my own test weblog and tinker a bit with every feature I could find.
MSN Spaces does not declare a doctype and their HTML does not validate. The RSS feeds do validate without Microsoft resorting to CDATA inside the description element.
The use of MSN Messenger as a weblog interface is the news I actually care about. I installed MSN Messenger 7 beta to take a look at the MSN Spaces integration.
Messenger now places a small star on the bottom right of each contact icon, as pictured above. Clicking on the icon reveals a contact card with My Space information on the first card.
You see the last post title and brief summary as well as some of my photographs. The contact card uses the same theme as my MSN Spaces pages. “See more” takes you to that person’s My Space page. Since this contact is me, I also see space to add entry or visit my MSN Spaces configuration page.
Very cool but too bad it is limited to MSN only for now. Hopefully there will be ways of adding non-MSN RSS content to the contact card as well.