abominable: thoroughly unpleasant or disagreeable
Hey Mike~
Mike, nothing personal meant here. I just watched the video you did with on10. I got nothing out of it. I still will not recommend using Spaces. I’m trying to give aggressive feedback here, because I got the feeling that you’re not listening. I know you are hearing, and you have lots of feedback. It just feels like typical MS crap right now, and that the hearing is not properly linked up to listening. I’m a huge MS fan. I feel the pain of those who are not. I don’t envy your position being the 800 pound guerilla. And, I want to help make Spaces better.
Please tell me what is to like about Spaces? The name is a rip off. The gadgets don’t exist publicly right now. The site responds slow (2nd day and 2nd try – didn’t post anything here yesterday because it was a first day and I wanted to be fair). Anonymous comments are not allowed (requires a Passport). There’s no way to remove advertising, either via a paid model, or by moving it elsewhere on the site. Did I mention that anonymous comments are not allowed? That’s stupid, stupid, stupid. As soon as I allow open pingbacks, I get tons of spam. I could go on for about 10 more minutes about what makes Spaces suck.
Argh! I’ve been waiting for anything to be happy about with it since I signed up for my MSN Space in the beginning, right when it went public. I was really excited, thinking it would get better, because there were so many users coming and they’d just have to get better. Insted, they got stereotypical Microsoft – huge, limited coolness, follow the money trail, have to release for many languages but leave your home based users out to dry…
Mike, it doesn’t look good. You’ll have hundreds of millions of users – because you got MSFT behind you. But right now, Spaces is lame and abominable!
The only, single pro I can think of for Spaces is that if you go to a space from a mobile device, it automatically recognizes that and shows a mobile version that looks much better than most other services. But, I’m the only person I personally know that cares about that. None of my friends or business associates care about that.
To everyone else, try WordPress, LiveJournal, TypePad or any other service. I almost guarantee that you’ll get more of what you want and less of what you don’t want.
Abominable!
UPDATE: Fixed typos. And want to call out the prompt reply from Mike Torres. Kudos!
Sorry you don’t like it. We don’t expect it to be for everyone, obviously, as software that works for everyone is just too confusing for anyone. We don’t expect people who like to blog using TypePad (and pay for it!) to necessarily want to switch to Spaces immediately.
The name isn’t a rip-off – there’s a long history behind this that I can’t get into but trust me, it isn’t a rip-off of anyone.
There *is* a way to remove advertising. Look in Settings
Anonymous comments aren’t allowed – you are right. We’re looking into allowing this in the future but there’s a good reason we can’t allow them at scale for 120 million users.
You can keep trackback spam from happening (mostly) by just limiting trackbacks to Spaces. Unfortunately, this is a problem for any provider, not just Spaces.
Gadgets are coming online shortly. We need people to build some! Right now we have four in the picker and the Windows Live Gallery will have more and more in time.
Hey Mike~
Kudos for your prompt response! I’ll check into removing advertising. Thanks for your other direct responses. By responding this way, hopefully Spaces can continue to improve.
It’s still not for me, as you pointed out. And, I’ll keep watching. I’m only one out of many millions.