Deleting comments from Windows Live Spaces

Spammers piss me off! No really, they’re scumbags; one particularly chatty person left over 50 spam comments on my Live Space this weekend. Deleting them all via your Spaces Home page is a real pain in the neck because each comment requires a round-trip of 4 mouse-clicks and each one results in a new page load – none of which are particularly speedy. Thankfully there’s a little known place from where deleting comments is much much easier.

The URL is http://<spaces-id>.mobile.spaces.live.com. You should replace <spaces-id> with whatever comes at the front of your regular Spaces URL; for example, the page that I go to is http://jamiethomson.mobile.spaces.live.com. When you get there you’ll see something like the following:

Its a very stripped down version of your space that is optimised for a mobile phone but that doesn’t mean that you can’t visit it from a regular computer. Once there you can delete comments to your heart’s content and you’ll find the page load times to be much MUCH quicker than the normal Spaces pages.

 

Hope that helps.

-Jamie

Windows Live Tags: clubhouse, how-to, spaces

I’ve broken 100000 page views on Spaces!

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

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:

1. I am associated with MUCH more of my "real-life" friends on Facebook than I am on Live Spaces
2. 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