v1 products generally suck. Beta of v1 products surely suck. That was my belief till today. MSN Spaces has changed that. For the uniniated, MSN Spaces is Microsoft's foray into the Blogging arena (http://spaces.msn.com). And the balance they have struck between myraids of feature and usability is amazing. Cool themes, amazingly simple drag-drop layout, email-based blogging, customer lists for sharing music/movie preferences, the list goes on. The things that blew me away

  1. Integration with Hotmail and MSN Messenger 7 beta - You can click on your friend's contact card and you can preview his blog
  2. Email-blogging: I simply wrote an email to my MSN space address, attached a few images, and sent the message using Outlook. And within seconds, it is on my MSN space. Not only do the pictures appear as thumbnail links on my blog, but they are automatically added to my MSN Space photo album. This is as easy as you can get.
  3. Photo album - you can have a slideshow-running photo album on your MSN space that scrolls all the images uploaded on your blog. One click and you can view the images in full screen
  4. Access control - you can make your MSN space public, accessible to messenger contacts only or private. So whether it is your secret rendezvous spot with your girlfriend, discussion avenue for your drinking buddies or a competition to Scobelizer (http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/), MSN space has a solution for you

If you want to check the blogs of the people working on the team, Scobelizer has a link to them (http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/12/01.html#a8785). If you dont mind looking at an hasty attempt to be cool, check out mine at http://spaces.msn.com/members/mayur/

Mayur