Windows Live Spaces
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Windows Live Spaces homepage
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| Developer(s) | Microsoft |
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| Stable release |
Wave 4 (Build 15.3.6553.0608) / June 7, 2010
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| Development status | Discontinued |
| Type | Social networking Blog |
| Website | http://spaces.live.com |
Windows Live Spaces was Microsoft's blogging and social networking platform. The site was originally released in early 2004 as MSN Spaces to compete with other social networking sites, and re-launched in 2006 as a part of a shifting of community services away from the MSN brand. Windows Live Spaces received an estimated 27 million (27,000,000) unique visitors per month as of August 2007. Despite being considered a useful messaging and communication tool, Windows Live Spaces has been criticized as not being as powerful as some of its alternatives. It was shut down in 2011 due to low viewership.
Features of Windows Live Spaces included a blogging system, photo gallery, lists, friends, a guestbook, and a social profile. A Spaces page can be personalized with "gadgets", modules that can be placed to enable further customization, HTML code, and media playlists. Contact cards were also used in other Windows Live applications and services to summarize the recent content added to a Space. RSS feeds are also available for content on a space.
Windows Live Spaces began as MSN Spaces and was launched in early December 2004 with the aim of allowing its users to reach out to others by publishing their thoughts, photos and interests in an easy and compelling way. With this goal, MSN Spaces finds itself competing with similar services like MySpace and Yahoo!'s 360°.
As well as allowing users to share their thoughts, photos and interests, MSN Spaces users were given over 100 varied themes and several different page layouts to choose from when designing their MSN Space. Users also had the option to set access rights for visitors to their MSN Space based on the relationship between them (e.g. Friends, Family etc.). Visitors were also granted when their contacts' had updated their MSN Space.
On August 1, 2006, MSN Spaces became part of the Windows Live services platform, and was rebranded as Windows Live Spaces. There were various, obvious differences between MSN Spaces and Windows Live Spaces, the most instantly evident being a redesigned layout engine. This allowed users greater flexibility in terms of the layout of their Space, for example, it allowed the ability to move the "Title and Tagline" module, where before the upgrade it was permanently fixed to the top of the page. The change also resolved some oft-criticised characteristics of MSN Spaces, such as the alignment of content on the computer screen.
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