Spaces seemed to be having a few problems when I tried to get there last night. Perhaps the reason was that they were busy releasing a new spaces home page. Check it out.

Good stuff. I like the activity list where I can see what all my friends have been up to although I have a feeling I've seen this somewhere before. Its particularly interesting to see that there's a fair bit of activity on skydrive:

I like the new navigation style. Submenus without actually looking too much like submenus.

There's a lot of potential for this activity list given that it could capture any activity people commit using their Live ID. Every live property has the potential for being able to post activity on here so one day we may see notifications of:

• change of messenger status
• posting of photos on Live Space
• addition of gadgets to Live Space
• items placed for sale on Expo
• questions asked or answered on QnA
• collection shared from Live Maps
• video posted on MSN video
• changes to XBox gamer card
• changes to Zune Social (after it launches)
• items posted to the Live Gallery
• an event being planned
• purchased a song from Zune marketplace
• posts in MSN groups (soon to be Live Groups)
• posts to online forums (forums.microsoft.com)
• downloads of public files from Skydrive

Its all pretty good but let's be honest, this is basically a clone of of what Facebook already have. Given Facebook's popularity though Microsoft didn't really have a choice but to copy them. If Microsoft really want to differentiate themselves in this arena then one option would be to provide avenues for interacting with other online services such as Flickr, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce,  etc... This list could then become an aggregator for all online activity and that's a pretty compelling scenario. One really quick win in this area would be to capture any blog entry that is posted from Live Writer, regardless of whether it is posted to Live Spaces or not.

Turning the idea on its head...it would be cool to be able to publish the activity list on other sites such as MySpace, Bebo and (them again) Facebook.

I'd also like to see more of Messenger on here. For example, Messenger has the ability to show "what I'm listening to now". There's no technical barrier to that being displayed on a person's Live Space.

As I write there's nothing on The Space Craft about this yet. I'm sure that'll change soon. Note that there is no change to the mobile spaces home page which is disappointing.

-Jamie

UPDATE: My home page has now reverted back to the old one. I guess they were just trying it out.