Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Launches Blogging Site
Jeff Clark writes "In yet another attempt to take over all of the Internet, MSN has launched a blog service called MSN Spaces with the new version of MSN Messenger due out shortly. Features include comments, stats and trackbacks just like every other blog out there. Another built-in feature is also available where you can send pictures from your camera-phone directly to your Space. Now you can let Mom know just exactly what happened at that party last night!" Reader JDBaker adds, "Microsoft have released the first public beta of MSN Messenger 7. It can be downloaded direct from Microsoft, and carries the same build number as the recent private beta release. New features include: Winks, Set Status Before Login, Drag and Drop Backgrounds and Feedback."
Animated smilies that make noise. The illiterates at my school are gonna be overjoyed at the prospect. I'm just going to be annoyed.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
That MS will bundle this with the next version of Windows, thus going up against LiveJournal and taking a large percentage of the new bloggers with it.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Another new feature of the MSN beta that the article fails to mention is it's un-godly amount of bloat.
Seriously, does anyone really need the Nudge function? To all those of you who don't use MSN (whom I hold the deepest respect for, btw), all Nudge does is shake your window and the recipients window in some weird kind of internet seizure.
Looks like I'm going to migrate back to IRC.
Prontab.net - Porn for geeks. (nsfw)
From clicking on the link, you can also visit some of the "recently updated Spaces" (Spaces, heh). My blog is plain as a loaf of bread, sure. But at least it looks semi-original. Maybe they'll add some "skins", with an equally original twist on the name for them.
VOTE!
They forgot to include the ability to have your system come to a crawl at an even faster pace with quicker ad and spam delivery
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I was reading through the list of things Microsoft were adding, thinking that it's just another place Google are at already, then I realised that while there's Gmail, there's no Gmessenger or similar as far as I'm aware.
:-)
How long do you reckon before Google launches such a thing, potentially pushing MSN Messenger out the market?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
How about, "In yet another attempt to make the Internet relevant to the average person?" Why is this a laudable goal for everybody but Microsoft to strive towards?
To have a one-stop shop for communication is pretty much what it's all about. E-mail, instant messaging, fax, voice, photos, movies, TV, radio, and the blog (considered to be the future of websites) converging in a simple-to-use way. This should be something to look forward to.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Great. MS making it easier for another swathe of barely litterate nobodies to spout off uninformed bollocks on the internet. Not like erm, us... erm. Bugger. *gets coat*
I've just took a look at MSN spaces. It's interface to create the weblog and change its layout is interesting and very easy to use. But my main concern is that it is very limiting. You can't edit the template in the way you can do it like in Blogger (which is now owned by Google). In blogger you can edit the HTML file that is the template of your weblog and this gives you the control on EVERYTHING but in MSN spaces you can just play with the layout of predefined "module" but can't really change the code behind. Also, it seems the total space allocated to each weblog is very small (10MB). Plase notice that it also includes the space for the photos and "music" so you can imagine you can't expect much from it. The other problem is that there is no support for internationalization: you can't create a chines, korean, arabic, persian... blog! You can't change the stylesheets to support RTL paragraphs etc. All in all, it's nice, but very limited. It's like comparing the notepad to Ultra-Edit....
MS is trying to do it again. They're trying to break down any barriers to setting up a blog. Great. Now I can be chastized for not reading my 8 year old cousin's blog, or even better, my 90 year old grandmother's.
What happened to the days when there was SOME barrier to entry, that at least made you put a LITTLE thought and energy into feeling important enough that people should read your every thought?
Try WordPress. Open source, PHP/MySQL based, nice. jtc
"...now you can let Mom know just exactly what happened at that party last night!" How many people are going to tell their mom what happened at the party last night? O.o I mean, that was between me and that blond chick, and only because we were drunk...
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Quite personally, I prefer spending $50 a year on a Custom DNS and my own private domain than putting my stuff on anyone elses server.
What I do is this:
1) Go get a Custom DNS from DynDNS.org.
2) Go get a Domain Name from a selection of many different registrars.
3) Go set up a box running Gentoo, Debian, SuSE, or FreeBSD, and install Apache.
And then boom. I'm the master of my own domain, for the low-low price of $50 per year. thats an average of $4 a month for hosting, totally within your control.
I can even give subdomains to the people I like, considering if I have enough bandiwdth. But that isn't a problem considering many Canadian ISP's offer over 800kbps upstream.
wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more?
Not to sound like a Luddite, but why would you need a web-log in order to keep a personal journal? If you want a personal diary, you could just turn on your laptop/desktop and use your word processor. Or, you could just purchase paper and ink and start writing. Or am I completely missing the point somehow?
Livejournal also has the private feature if you have to read your private entries outside of your computer/house.
Livejournal supports custom groups who can read your journal. This means your close friends, work associates, or your friends excluding your wife when you want to bitch about your relationship or work without certain people reading it.
Livejournal also supports communities you can hide for porn viewing....looks innocent.
I prefer an online portal like Livejournal because it has a ton of features and is ahead of blogger and everything else plus communities to meet people with all sorts of interests.
http://saveie6.com/
New features include: Winks, Set Status Before Login, Drag and Drop Backgrounds and Feedback.
And, as been mentiond, a huge amount of bloat. Plus 'buy emoticons', 'backgrounds', 'winks' etc spam littered throughout the program with direct links to MS sites to buy shitty little pictures which you can get for free. The "for sale" emoticons are more prominently placed and larger and in the way than the emoticons you actually use. The whole thing is just a way to sell that crap. A blantent sell out.
I.O.U One Sig.
Why the links to "every other blog"? Those are not blog sites, just links to blogging software. More appropriate links would have been to sites like these.
AnimeNEXT anime convention
Hi, my name is Rob, and I'm a Linux advoc*$#*&^ NO CARRIER ^^^^^^^^^^^^
HELLO. MY NAME IS ROB AND I AM A MICROSOFT ADVOCATE.
[insert MSN advertisments here]
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
This is what businesses do: they attempt to gain control of as many markets as possible, and it's becoming clear that blogging is a new market. Argue against the quality of the software, point out that Microsoft seems to be lacking in innovative new ideas, argue that people really shouldn't try to make money from the internet, claim that customers might get better products by having companies specialise in providing only a few really good services rather than having fingers in thousands of pies, but don't bitch against Microsoft for doing what profit-making companies try to do, which is be involved in whole markets as the best way to get rid of competition and therefore the best way to make money.
I wonder if there will be moderation of blogs. If for example, I create a vehemently anti-Microsoft blog (possibly one that borders on slander), will the block/censor it? How does this work on other blogs?
I think the question is more valid for Microsoft's blog service because there are more anti-Microsoft people than anti-Google people (or whatever). And many of the anti-Microsoft people would find it cute or ironic to post an anti-Microsoft blog on Microsoft's own servers.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
BlogIM has allowed you to update your blog via IM for ages.
(Although the site is a tad stalled. And it remains, as is famously the case for all the author's projects, about 2 weeks from true completion).
0daymeme.com: Great stuff.
"Note: With the latest version of Internet Explorer you can take advantage of richer customization options." is the message it shows when I use firefox. Slick m$. Slick. Although.. in all honesty, when I read that, I did think.. "hm...maybe I SHOULD dust off good ol' IE and see how it looks.."
The only new feature I want to see is for MSN Messenger to stop fargin using IE even though I set my default browser to Firefox!
Even if I setup a new computer for someone and hide IE, and insteall Firefox, the minute they hit that damn "x new messages" email popup in Messenger, they're using IE and the viri/spyware starts rolling in.
Perhaps he is afraid of hard drive failure as well as fire/flood/pet's teeth. I would be tempted to use gmail...just continuously replying to the same thread and archiving.
As the previous commenter said, LiveJournal lets you blog "privately" You can set filters on each post you make. From totally private (only you can see) to totally public. It allows you to make lists of people that are allowed to view it when they're logged into LiveJournal. So If I only want Old Koreans on my friends list to be able to view my posts, I can make a list of OLD Koreans, choose that as the filter for a certain post (or as the default filter for posting) and it's done.
You can check mine here btw: http://www.livejournal.com/users/ambienceman
MY SECRET DIARIES
As if the "internet-generaton" isn't full enough of themselves, why dear $deity are blogs so bloody popular?
/.
I just don't get it. If you are so self-absorbed that you feel the need to publish every thought & whim about yourself on the web (as if the anybody on the planet actually cared about you), how/why would you then go searching for and reading other peoples mutterings?
As a previous person stated, there used to be a barrier to entry that prevented a lot of this drivel from poluting the electrons; but alas now it's easy to whine and pout in public.
I think Fight Club got it right: "You are not a beautiful & unique butterfly." We are faulty-carbon units that need a swift kick in the ass more then we are getting.
People please, get over yourselves. * If you agree with anything that I have stated here, please come to my blog at http://blah.blah/ at sign my guestbook! **
*PS: I was not refering to any of the beautiful butterflies that visit
**PPS: For the humour impaired - I was joking
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Seems to me that Blogger is already taking over the blog space. It seems that MS is a day late and a dollar short in this arena. MS seems doesn't seem to compete very well in the Internet arena (outside of Explorer, and people are now discovering the Firefox is a much better browser). Once you have a blog, its hard to switch blog providers. http://fromthemorning.blogspot.com/
[FromTheMorning]
The difference is that these products are coming from people volunteering their free time to write them. They are scratching a specific itch, or filling a need by producing software that in some cases is better than commercial counterparts.
Microsoft is spending billions on R&D, hiring the best minds it can, so I would hope they are being held to a higher standard than some geeks who write software for themselves and their friends. Yet we see that even with this diference, Microsoft still just ends up copying everyone else and making (in many cases) poorer quality software than the open source geeks.
Finkployd
I'm not saying no features is better, but I'm not certain how many people I'd trust with features like that. Some people can use it effectively, others... not so much. For Instances, how many the "geek" slashdotters forget to close the Italics/bold tags and type the remainder of the their message an annoyingly hard to read font?