Some new stuff and some interesting numbers from Spaces: it's now available in 51 countries in 25 languages, there have been 93 million spaces created since Spaces was released, and more than 111 million people a month use Spaces. More than 18 million photos 8 million photos (corrected, see Chris Keating's comment below) a day are uploaded to Spaces, with over 4 billion photos added since day 1. So with that here's the list of improvements Spaces will be announcing in the morning:
Windows Live Spaces is adding a bunch of new features as we speak including:
- A new home page with information on people in your social network and new stuff on your Spaces like comments, messages, and pending requests.
- More customization features with more colors and themes, and now the ability to upload and add a custom image as a background for your space
- A new Guestbook feature (finally, woohoo!)
- A new messaging feature - send a message to "your Spaces friends and meet other people on Spaces by sending them messages". Hover over a picture profile and you'll see a "send a message" link, or use the link in the Visitor tools module on a person's space.
- Lots of added functionality to Gadgets and Modules, including spanning the full width of a column, removing borders, and changing titles, and a new ability to add multiple modules at the top or bottom of your space that span all of the columns - "perfect for your space title and tagline". You can also have more than one of the same gadget on your space.
- Improvements to photo management, including a new page for viewing and editing albums on your space, and a new layout for individual photos pages, making it easier and faster to view your photos and see all comments at a glance.
- Improved Mobile interaction with Spaces, including the ability to see at a glance recent updates and comments on your space, add, delete, view, and browse your friends, and view profile information, all from your mobile device.
- Book and music lists are improved, and they look better in narrow view
- Some dev improvements, too: including individual rss feeds for profiles, photo albums, blog categories, top-level directories, friends, and lists; a new set of APIs for sending messages, adding gadgets, and adding modules; and support for one-click customization of gadgets when added to a space.
You can check out The Space Craft for more information on the new features (the blog entry will be up in the morning), and we'll be bringing you more on them here, too, of course .
Windows Live Hotmail, a completely rebuilt web based mail client set to replace MSN Hotmail, started its rollout to selected markets this week. This morning, I talked on the phone with two members of the Windows Live Hotmail team from their offices in Mountain View, California. Omar Shahine and Ellie Powers-Boyle have been working on "Kahuna" since 2004, and we talked about the code base, the beta, performance, and more.