July 29, 2005
@ 03:06 PM

Mike Torres has a blog post entitled  On "MSN: Social Networking Edition" where he points to news stories about a core piece of a future version of MSN Spaces he and I have been working on for the past few months. Mike writes

On "MSN: Social Networking Edition"

Wow, is this actually true?  If so, I wonder how this will change the way people find and communicate with others in the future.

Quote (emphasis mine)

Microsoft Monitor: MSN: Social Networking Edition
A forthcoming "friend of friends" feature will add personal networks of friends to a MSN Space. In someone's My Space [sic], there will appear pictures of the friends, which can include friends of other friends. Friends can be added from people known or associated with friends or from MSN Spaces searches. Blake used the example of searching for golf blogs. If friends are on MSN Messenger, an icon indicates so.

More on Blake, Yusuf, MSN Messenger file sharing, and "Microsoft's new Web-based mail system" as well.  It is an interesting read... 

Funniest part of the post: "small consumer adoption [of Spaces]".  Joe is usually quick to take a shot at Microsoft without actually learning the facts first.  Come on, Joe...  I think the most recent public number was 17 million spaces created worldwide.  Compare that to any of our competitors in their first 3 years of existence.  Yeah...  small consumer adoption.  Maybe 17 million Roombas created those spaces :)

Mary Jo Foley has a little bit more here: 
Microsoft Watch.  My favorite part:

"Our ability to enter, differentiate and compete has never been stronger," Mehdi told the Wall Street analysts and media representatives who attended the analyst meeting.

Couldn't agree more

Although I've primarily been talking about my work on getting a public API for MSN Spaces off the ground, I also work on our social software platform on the back end as well. Once we ship the next version I'll be able to talk a bit more about some of the design decisions we made and I'll get to see how users end up utilizing the features we've been working in.

I love my day job.


 

Saturday, 30 July 2005 00:46:31 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Forgive my ignorance, this is not a troll. Isn't that just like orkut?
Scott Hanselman
Saturday, 30 July 2005 02:39:42 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
It is actually very different from Orkut, but you'll have to wait and see how!
Monday, 01 August 2005 22:26:07 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Hi Dare,
When you get back from Nigeria, I'd be interested in talking to you about the MSN Spaces API (under NDA) as I'm working on a book proposal that includes Web Search APIs as well as all things related to MS search (in products & MSN). You can also email me at v-johnka.

Thanks,
John
Tuesday, 02 August 2005 14:24:16 (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
Dare,

Don't know if this is the correct forum but here goes. My favourite hobby is golf, I'd love to be able to use my MSN space as a place to publish my golf scores. Now I can do that at the moment no problems by typing in the Html markup to render the scorecard, but I love to be able to have a form available that lets me enter my golf score (and all the various meta-data like yardage, par and stoke index etc.) into my MSN Space. My plan was to develop a trixie script for my space that would render a form then construct the necessary html to render my scorecard, just wondering what the MSN team have in mind for requests such as mine.
Ripster
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