Review of the NEW windows live spaces

After my review of Windows Live Writer I thought I would review its companion product … Windows Live Spaces 

I have to say …. Im pretty suprised by Spaces …Its pretty nice… I mean … its no wordpress … but its pretty sweat

For my full review with pictures click to read more

tags: Windows+live+spaces , Msn spaces, blogging , Blogs, microsoft, review, Windows+live+spaces+review Wordpress Windows

So anyways…here is the review

This is the main page … it has all the recent posts on spaces

This is the very sleek looking login page…it looks a whole lot cooler than the old msn login … if you already have a hotmail account …you already have a space

 

This is the main view of windows live spaces once you have logged in  every single part of your space can be dragged around (ajaxy!!!)

This is the settings page.. it is very simple and does not give much in the way of customization … , but it’s very functional

 

All of spaces menus are neat and drop-down , very simple to use

Here is a picture of the post interface ….it is very neat and has all the tools you need like alignment , links , pictures , fonts ,emoticons , etc …it allows you to preview the entry or save it as a draft before publishing

Right under the post title you will see a box that says catagories … it has about 10 default catagories … but  if you click “add a catagory … a nice  (AJAX!!!) box pops up to enter the name of your new catagory

 

It is also very easy to add links via (ajax!!!) entry boxes

The comment form is good…it looks about the same as most other comment forms with the addition of 4 buttons for :Underline , Italic , Bold , and Hyperlink

….Now …on the topic of Customization ..yes like most blogging software there are themes/styles/templats … AND LOTS OF THEM there are abotu 100 templates …and they are all pretty good …

there are also many “modules” to add to spaces …these are like plugins/extensions there are a lot of them

 

also another nice thing about spaces is that you can change the layout of any of the themes  on the fly

 

spaces also has the cool feature of rss widgets (Like wordpress) so you can add as many rss feeds as you want that will appear in your sidebars (also like wordpress) I have My Digg feed and my Wordpress.com feed

One other thing I should mention is that there is no direct template custumization … now editing templates at all … no html code in sight …which is probably ok for about 80% of people ….I Give spaces an 8/10 ….it is a nice upgrade from msn spaces …but it lacks some features that would make it even better like template editing

Bottom Line:

Spaces is a great app with lots of potential …it has social networking features and a nice ajax interface

Who Needs it:

People who want a blog NOW and like the social networking features and don’t mind the fact that you can’t customize the templates …also for less sophisticated users