Jamie's space: Live Spaces

I’ve broken 100000 page views on Spaces!

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:50:55 GMT

Is that good? I have no idea. How many page views do other Spaces users out there have? I’ll bet Chris Webb has me beat hands down!!!

Blog cleanup

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:24:10 GMT

I've spring-cleaned my Live Space!!!

I decided it was time to get rid of the extraneous crap that I never use because to me Spaces is a blogging platform; I have no use for it being full of so-called social networking type gadgets that no visitors to my blog care about. So, out go the photos module, my Zune Card, my Profile and my guestbook. If you want to see my profile then you can still see it here, and my Zune card is here.

I feel much better, thanks.

-Jamie

Live Spaces sucks more and more day by day

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:38:48 GMT

Yesterday I awoke to find that some scumbag called Max (http://ur-blog.spaces.live.com/) had left over 20 identical spam comments on my various blog entries and to say I was not amused was an understatement. Looking around some of my friends' spaces I see he's done it elsewhere as well.

I used the Report Abuse link at the bottom of every Spaces page to report him and was pleased to receive an email back from Live Support fairly quickly. It said:

we suggest that you remove the offensive comments that you deem inappropriate. You also have the option to change your permission settings to "Messenger" or "Private" so that only those who know you (either in your Messenger Contacts or MSN Address Book) can access your Space.

Well, I have at least two issues with that.

Firstly, I don't want to restrict the general public from my blog. That's the point of a blog - its there so that I can talk to the world.
Secondly the volume of spam comments that I get is now so big that I don't have the time to go through and delete them all, primarily because Live Spaces doesn't give me a good way of doing it. For every spam comment I have to browse to the blog entry, click edit, click delete, click save and then head back to Spaces Home to go through the same rigmarole.

That's easily 30 seconds per comment and I simply don't have time to go through that. How about just giving me the option to delete the comment from my Spaces Home page? Perhaps even using an AJAX popup rather than a full postback? None of this is helped by the fact that Spaces is getting slower and slower and slowwwwwwwwer.

Robert Scoble was right, Spaces sucks. In its current incarnation it does anyway. I'm making an assumption that they're working on a complete overhaul given that we haven't seen any significant changes in a long long time. I hope I'm right.

So, you may ask, why am I still here? The answer is complicated but in short I do think that Microsoft will get this right. Eventually. The stuff I talk about here is relevant to Windows Live so it makes sense to use the tools that I write about. Most importantly though is the thing I keep coming back to - I don't need a seperate login to be able to use Spaces. I use the same login that I use for my Mail, for my calendar, for my files, for Mesh... Live ID gets me into more online properties that I need than any other login and that is very important to me.

-Jamie

Spaces: I want to know what my friends are commenting on

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 10:12:19 GMT

Currently in Live Spaces the only way of knowing that one of my friends is actively using Live Spaces is if they:

Post some photos
Post files to Skydrive
Post a blog entry
Post or modify a list
Update their profile
Befriend someone

(info taken from Rob Dolin's blog entry Windows Live Spaces home improvements: What's New details, recent Photo comments, and more)

There is one crucial activity that I (and I'm sure many of my friends) partake in on Live Spaces and that is commenting on other people's blogs. I would love to know what blog entries my friends are interested in and furthermore I would love for friends of my friends to be made aware of my blog and come and visit it - that would promote great viral growth for my blog. None of this happens today but it would if I was notified of my friends' blog commenting activities via my Spaces newsfeed. For example, my friend Chris Webb invariably posts stuff that all the rest of my friends would never be aware of but perhaps they would be made aware of it if I were commenting and they were notified via their newsfeed.

Hence I've just posted the following to Spaces feedback:

Please tell me (via my Live Spaces newsfeed) when one of my friends has commented on someone else's Spaces blog. I would love to know what my friends are up to and, moreover, I would love for people I don't know to be made aware of my blog.

[I also added this to my feedback lista]

You can do the same so over to you. Would you like this feature in Spaces? If so let me know in the comments section below and then get over to http://feedback.live.com and ask for it. The more people that ask for it then the more likely we are to get it.

-Jamie

Spaces Categories....can it get any worse?

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:41:02 GMT

Five days ago I whined about Live Spaces' very very poor support for blog tagging, preferring to implement blog categories instead. As is the norm I didn't get any response to my submission on http://feedback.live.com requesting blog tagging be implemented so I figured I would go through all my existing posts and put them into categories instead. Big mistake.

I've been through and created 14 categories so far, you can see them here:

I wanted to create a new category called "RDF" for my blog entry FOAF from November 2007. Live Spaces wouldn't let me do that though, oh no. The option to create a new category is grayed out.

I don't actually know why but I'm guessing that I have reached my full quota of categories. Not only that but my category list contains a load of categories that were pre-populated but(and this makes me REALLY angry) I don't have a way of getting rid of them:

So, let's review. Live Spaces doesn't support a basic feature of nearly every blogging engine on the planet so I have to use their wholly inferior feature instead. That feature contains limits that I'm not even told about. And I can't remove the categories that were created for me and am not using.

Words fail me quite frankly and constructive criticism is not something I feel like providing right now. This is diabolical.

Is anyone reading from the Live Spaces team? I hope so because I'm sick of posting stuff to http://feedback.live.com and not getting a response.

Change this. Change it now.

-Jamie

Blog tagging on Windows Live Spaces

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 11:13:58 GMT

Tagging blog posts is an integral feature of nearly all blog engines and Live Spaces supports it, sort of, with the notion of categories; for example, here is my Zune category.

The whole category/tagging thing on Live Spaces really narks me though because each blog post can exist in only one category and that really is of little use. Take my blog from 13th February 2008 entitled Throwing some more Zune ideas out there for example. Its in my Zune category because its principally about Zune, but its about a lot of other things as well like Live Messenger, MSN Soapbox and Windows Live Groups. I'd like to tag it as such but Live Spaces doesn't enable me to do that. That's what led me to submit the following to feedback.live.com:

Blog posts can only appear in one category and that's not particularly useful. Better would be the ability to tag blog entries with zero, one or many tags. Just like nearly every other blog engine on the planet enables you to do.

[Also added to my feedback lista.]

If tagging gets introduced to Windows Live Spaces then it opens up some great possibilities. I would love it if http://spaces.live.com/tags/zune (with an RSS feed: http://spaces.live.com/tags/zune/feed.rss) showed me every blog entry that had ever been tagged with "Zune". There is a plethora of content out there just waiting to be read, Microsoft just need to give us a useful way of finding it because the existing search functionality on Live Spaces is not sufficient at all.

-Jamie

Spaces: Groups or tags. But not both please.

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:53:43 GMT

A little known feature of Live Spaces is the ability to tag your friends. Observe the defining of tags:

and the ability to view my friends by those tags:

That would be fairly useful if the same functionality didn't exist elsewhere, namely in my Live Contacts. Take a look at Messenger for example:

You can see that I have the ability to place my contacts into more than one group; I could also have chosen to demonstrate this by providing screenshots from Live Contacts or Live Mail because my contact groups are synchronised to those properties as well. Thus, there is a many-to-many relationship between my contacts and groups, exactly as there is between my Spaces friends and tags.

My Spaces friends are merely a subset of my Live Contacts so, to cut a long story short, tagging my friends and putting contacts into groups is exactly the same thing; the different nomenclature is irrelevant.

I don't enjoy having to specify the same information in more than one place therefore I submitted the following to http://feedback.live.com:

Please remove the ability to tag my friends and replace it with existing contact groups functionality. Functionally there is no difference between tagging and grouping anyway, so please don't stipulate that I have to define the same information in two places (which I do currently).

and I'd urge you to do the same. I also appended this to my feedback lista.

-Jamie

Lebron on Live Spaces

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 09:47:17 GMT

Building a clone of MySpace obviously didn't help Live Spaces catch its competitor in the same way that Facebook has done but I guess if packing features in doesn't help then good ol' star power will have to do instead.

Check out Lebron James' first blog entry on his Live Space http://lebron-blog.spaces.live.com/.

Expect more Lebron branded stuff on MSN/Windows Live before too long in addition to this. At the time of writing he's got 296 friends; seeing if that number increases dramatically or not might be a useful portent as to the success of Lebron-icising MSN/Windows Live.

I don't prefer Windows Live Spaces to Facebook

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 03:41:55 GMT

Brandon LeBlanc just posted a blog entry entitled I prefer Windows Live Spaces to Facebook. Well Brandon, I can't agree I'm afraid. When compared as pure social-networking offerings Facebook wins hands down for 2 main reasons:

I am associated with MUCH more of my "real-life" friends on Facebook than I am on Live Spaces
Facebook is feature rich compared to Live Spaces. e.g. Live Spaces' newsfeed (currently) contains only 6 different types of information, Facebook's contains much more than that.

I should post a disclaimer at this point. On an earlier post of Brandon's I left a comment saying "I couldn't give a toss that none of my friends are on [Live Spaces] cos I don't want to waste my time on "social networking". I don't do Facebook for the same reason." I have to admit that's no longer true - of late I have gotten the bug and have been drawn inexorably into regularly visiting Facebook.

So, you may ask, why do I use Live Spaces so much? Well the answer is pretty simple, and its something I alluded to in the first line of this blog entry. Facebook is a social-networking platform and in my opinion its the best one there is ... but that is ALL it is. My Windows Live ID (which gets me into Live Spaces) gives me access to a plethora of things that you don't get with Facebook such as:

Online email with offline syncing that works better than any other sync method out there (with a choice of any email address on the planet)
Online file storage
Personalised news content
Blogging
Document collaboration
Music-based social network
Geo-Collections
Instant Messaging (actually, you could argue that because I have more contacts on Live Messenger than on Facebook then my Windows-Live-based social network is actually larger, but given that this is in reply to a post comparing Facebook with Windows Live Spaces I'll let them one slide)
Video hosting
Hi-def video hosting
Calendar
Contacts shared across email, instant messaging, mobile phone and social networking
Everything working on my phone too
3rd party sites (example)
List-keeping

In summary the reason I align myself with Windows Live is simply because it provides access to so much more services than any other online ID. There aren't many of the Windows Live services that could be considered best-of-breed but collectively they form the best integrated overall offering out there. People who read my blog regularly are probably sick of me saying that but its true so I'm going to keep saying it.

-Jamie

New Spaces Feature - Friends in common

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 04:47:50 GMT

I spotted something on the Live Space of my friend James this evening:

I hadn't noticed before but Live Spaces have quietly introduced a feature that shows you which friends you and whoever's Space you happen to be visiting have got in common. That's a nice little enhancement although there's no prizes for working out where this idea came from.

I'm glad to see this feature though, no matter how small it is, because it seems ages since something new came out of Windows Live.

-Jamie

Do you like your comments in reverse chronological order?

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 19:00:28 GMT

Comments to blog entries in Windows Live Spaces appear with the most recent comment at the top. Its the same on the comment feed on the Spaces personal home page.

Quikboy Michael has left a comment on my blog saying

I hate how comments in Live Spaces have the most recent comment on the top. Live Spaces is the only site that does that, and it's dumb. Maybe they'll fix that

Sorry Michael but I have a different point of view on this one, I actually really like the fact that comments appear in reverse chronological order. When I revisit a blog entry I want to see the comments that are most pertinent and as far as I'm concerned that's the most recent ones. Perhaps we should have the option to pick which order we would like?

One change I WOULD like to see regarding Spaces comments is to see them threaded so that I can reply specifically to someone else's comment and so that they appear like a discussion forum.

What say you?

-Jamie

Will there be an API for the Spaces 'What's new' feed?

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 02:27:43 GMT

The Live Spaces 'What's new' feed (akin to Facebook's news feed) has been warmly received and, judging by the amount of activity that I'm seeing on my Live Space home page since it was introduced, is driving up usage of Live Spaces as a whole.

Currently the 'What's new' feed only supports photos, files, blog entries, lists, profile updates and new friends. I have spoken before about how I'd like to see the ability for other activity committed using my Windows Live ID to be displayed on the same feed. I was pleased to see that upon reading that blog entry Dare Obasanjo, one of the main architects of the 'What's new' feed, made an open invite for people to contact him about doing just that.

Thinking on I'd like an API for the 'What's new' feed to do more than just enable people to write to it. I'd like people be given the ability to read from it as well. The reason is simple, I read my 'What's new' feed every day but once I've read it I invariably close down the browser because usually I'm not really interested in much else on there. Hence, I'd like the same information to be made available via an API so that I can have that same information displayed in a web gadget or on a Vista Sidebar gadget. Or perhaps even as an application within Facebook. There's lots of interesting possibilities, all it needs is an API. How about it Dare?

-Jamie

Gatineau, Live Spaces, Analysis Services et al...

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 03:31:19 GMT

Today I took 10 minutes to watch a video on Gatineau, Microsoft's web analytics offering that is in some ways a competitor to Google Analytics. You can see the video for yourself here: http://visitmix.com/Blogs/Joshua/gatineau-analytics-walkthrough-and-details/

I'm particularly interested in this because in a former life I was heavily engaged in web analytics work and was responsible for developing and maintaining a web analytics solution for one of the UK's leading high street banks. One of the main things that my clients wanted at that time was demographic segmentation of their visitors but that was difficult to achieve because it would usually require people to login and on most of the sites I worked on logging in was not a necessity. Gatineau though is different. It uses a visitor's Live ID if they have one (I assume it picks up the Live ID from a cookie on the client) to access demographic information for that site visitor which is then aggregated and made available for Gatineau clients to browse.

Gatineau metrics

The video above made mention of Gatineau tracking individual page views. That's fairly useful information but in my experience site owners care more about browsing sessions and the metrics they measure browsing by are:

session length
number of page views in a session
session entry point
session exit point

There was no mention of session tracking in the video so I would hope that that was an oversight and session tracking is fully supported. I have applied for a Gatineau subscription so hopefully I shall find out.

Live Spaces integration

I talked recently about how Microsoft will look to leverage the Windows Live ID in as many possible ways that they can think of. I see no reason why Gatineau metrics shouldn't be made available to people with an active Live Spaces site. Its fair to assume that the percentage of Live Space users with an active Live ID will be significantly higher than for other sites and I would love to log onto my Spaces home page and instantly see a demographic breakdown of all my site visitors. That is definitely attainable with Gatineau so hopefully the Live Spaces guys are listening.

Leveraging SQL Server

Aside from the Gatineau features I am also very interested in the technology infrastructure that underpins it. Those that know me from prior to beginning this blog will know that I am a SQL Server pro by trade and specifically I deal in SQL Server's BI technologies like SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). When I saw the video it was immediately obvious to me (I hope I'm right) that SSAS is at the heart of Gatineau's analytical prowess and I wouldn't mind betting that SSIS is being used to do the heavy lifting of data behind the scenes. Once Gatineau has been going for a few months I wouldn't mind seeing a case study produced that talks about the sort of data volumes they are pushing because if Gatineau picks up (which it will) those data volumes are going to be unfathomable. If the Gatineau team want a SSIS pro to come and help them manage that data then I'm ready and waiting ;).

The use of SSAS raises some interesting questions for myself and I'm sure for people like Chris Webb as well.

How much data have they got pushed through their cube?
What is the granularity of that data?
How many members are in the Gatineau customer dimension?
Actually, never mind Gatineau customers, how many members are in the browser dimension? Last I heard there were 450m active Live IDs although the video does state that the presented data is aggregated. That doesn't necessarily mean that the data isn't stored at the granularity of each individual browser though.
How do they ensure that Gatineau customers can only see their own data and no-one else's?
What hierarchies are they building on browsers and on Gatineau customers?
How do they partition the data?
What's the ratio of known browsers to unknown browsers? This will be an interesting indication of Live ID distribution.
Are they managing the browser dimension as a type 2 dimension? If they are then the data is going to explode even more.
What tweaks have been made to the SSAS engine to enable serving up huge data volumes like these? I have heard on the grapevine that some serious changes have been made to the SSAS engine purely because of the work going on in Microsoft AdCenter.

These questions might not interest most people reading this but to me they are fascinating. I'm going to keep digging until I find some answers.

In the video the guy from the Gatineau team talked about enabling customers to export data to CSV files. Hmm..well..yeah..that's errr....BORING! If this data is stored in an Analysis Services cube then I want to fire up my favourite MDX client and start firing my own queries against it. Better still, let me download to a local cube file so that I can slice-and-dice it to my heart's content.

Moreover, will Gatineau customers be given access to the raw logs that Gatineau collects? There will be a wealth of information in those logs that Gatineau simply won't be able to present because they have to cater for all customers. Access to that raw data would be a wonderful proposition for customers; let me try and explain why. Imagine Amazon were a Gatineau user, here is a URI taken from a link on Amazon's homepage:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000JO7PIM/ref=s9_asin_image_2/102-1270678-8696941?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-1&pf_rd_r=1XKJ8BEV5BDRHM99M3Z1&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=315507801&pf_rd_i=507846

There is an abundance of information in that URI that means a lot to Amazon (particularly after the '?') but that Gatineau simply will not report because they don't understand what the different parts of the URI mean. This may be Gatineau's Achilles Heel.

I'm looking forward to using Gatineau and as an when I have more information about it I shall talk more about it here. if you want to know more check out the video linked to at the top of this blog entry and check out the blog of Ian Thomas at http://www.liesdamnedlies.com/. Ian is one of the main guys working on Gatineau and he gives the 411 on Gatineau here. if you want to understand just how significant Gatineau is to Microsoft's Ad business (the answer is "incredibly so") then read Ian's blog entry Welcome to the world of Microsoft APS.

-Jamie

UPDATE: I was contacted by Thierry D'Hers from the Analysis Services team today. He tells me that in fact Analysis Services is NOT being used by Gatineau but it will be in the future. So good and bad news then.

New Spaces home page

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 02:00:12 GMT

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.

Views Today???

Sun, 19 Aug 2007 18:23:41 GMT

When I look at my spaces home page I see the 'Views Today' metric. Does this number change if we look at our own blogs? I've run a rudimentary test and it looks as though it doesn't (which is good), but I'd like to know for sure.

Anyone know?

-Jamie

P.S. Sorry, not a proper blog entry I know...