Mike has a post entitled 5 Things I Dislike About MSN Spaces where he lists the top 5 issues he has with the service. 

Five things I dislike about MSN Spaces:

1. I can't use BlogJet to post to my blog today.  Not a huge deal, but I love this little tool.  Web browsers (Firefox included!) just don't do it for me in the way of text editing.

2. We don't have enough themes, which means there isn't enough differentiation between spaces.  People come in a lot of flavors.

3. We don't have comments on anything other than blog entries, which means a lot of people are using comments to either a) comment on photos, or b) comment on the space itself.

4. The Statistics page doesn't roll-up RSS aggregator "hits", only web page-views.  I want to know who is reading this post in various aggregators.

5. The recent blog entry on the MSN Messenger 7.0 beta contact card doesn't show enough information to compel me to visit the user's space.  

since I'm the eternal copycat I also decided to put together a top 5 list of issues I'd like to see fixed in the service. Some of them I am in the process of fixing and some I'm still nagging folks like Mike to fix since they are UI issues and have nothing to do with my areas of responsibility. Here's my list

Five things I'd like to see fixed in MSN Spaces:

1. I can't post to my blog using standard weblog tools such as the BlogJet, w.bloggar or Flickr. I now have 3 blogs and I'd love to author my posts in one place then have it automatically posted to all three of them. My MSN Spaces blog prevents this from happening today.

2. The text control for posting to your blog should support editing raw HTML and support a WYSIWYG editting. I find it stunning that open source projects like dasBlog & Community Server::Blogs have a more full featured edit control for posting to ones blog than a MSN Spaces.

3. The user experience around managing and interacting with my blogroll is subpar. I'd love to be able to upload my aggregator subscription list as an OPML file to my MSN Space blog roll. While we're at it, it would be cool to render MSN Spaces blogs differently in my blog roll and links in my posts perhaps with a pawn such as what LiveJournal does with Livejournal user pawn which links to a user's profile.

4. I want to be able to upload music lists from other play lists formats besides Windows media player. I have a bunch of playlists in WinAmp and iTunes which I want to upload to my MSN Space but don't have the patience to transcribe. It is cool that we allow uploading Windows Media Player playlists but what about iTunes and WinAmp?

5. I need more ways to find other MSN Spaces that I might be interested in. The recently updated spaces and newly created spaces widgets on the MSN Spaces homepage aren't cutting it for me. In additon, once that is fixed it would also be cool if it was made really simple to subscribe to interesting MSN Spaces in my RSS aggregator of choice using a one-click subscription mechanism.


 

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