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MSN Spaces Goes Beta

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This is huge! I'm actually writing this entry before the beta goes into
effect (about 4 hours from now), but I can't post it until 9 pm PST. I only know
about it because of an internal email from Mike Torres. So, I'm guessing the
blogsphere will light up with activity tonight and tomorrow. I'm really excited
about this release. The technology and social use cases for blogging have
evolved considerably in the past few years. It'll be exciting to see how Spaces
will let people express themselves. I'm not going to list all of the features
here - you can go the site for that or see
what
Dare has to say about it if you're curious.

These are the first things I want to find out about it:

  • Does it support the ATOM API to support authoring tools for posting to it?
    As Dare
    mentions here    , there is currently no support for a publishing API in the
    beta. Personally, I would be completely fine if they decided to publish a
    Spaces-specific API. I would prefer the ATOM API if they feel they it is
    extensible for the features they need to support.
  • Can I attach photos to the emailed entries I send up? aka moblog. Yes you can! It it works surprisingly well. Be
    aware the entire message size (the message and the base64 encoded jpg
    attachment) must not exceed 400K. This limitation isn't too bad, but at the
    time of this post it was not listed anywhere in the help or mobile settings
    section. Another neat part of this functionality is the photo you post is
    automatically added to a "My Blog Photos" album. Nice.
  • How far can I push the extensibility of the look and feel of my space?
    I was surprised by how much you can actually change the
    look and feel. I think they've done a good job and it's intuitive. The page is
    broken up into modules and you can add/remove and place each module
    independently. It's good. Now, as far as creating your own theme or apply your
    own CSS stylesheets, I'm pretty sure that's not possible and I don't know what
    the plans are in that regard. I'll bug Dare about that later.
  • Will Messenger 7.0 provide me a more robust programming environment for
    it? I don't know about this yet, but I am super excited
    about the changes in Messenger. Oh man, I had the best time last night with
    some of my team members. Between the nudge, winks, inking messages, and the
    themes/backgrounds ... well, let's just say I felt rediculous for being able
    to have so much fun with an IM client. Okay, none of that had anything to do
    with spaces. I wasn't sure what to expect with Spaces integration, but it's
    pretty cool. I haven't seen "gleaming" in action yet and the "blog to spaces
    from messenger" feature is akin to "email to hotmail from messenger".
    Basically, it saves you from having to log in and navigate to the new blog
    entry form.

Pehaps I'll edit this entry after I get some answers. As
you can see from the answers above, I did in fact decide to come back and edit
this entry.

I know this isn't about XML, Web Services, or Software Architectures, but
I'm also a huge fan of blogging and the technologies behind
it.