Spaces – the numbers

From WindowsITPro (Paul Thurrott’s article, Windows Live Spaces to Take on Social Networking Services):

So far, MSN Spaces has proven to be enormously popular. The service sports 123 million unique users, with roughly 3 million users visiting MSN Spaces every second. Users upload six million photos to the service every day, requiring 1TB of additional storage every nine days. To put these numbers in perspective, it took MSN Messenger six years to reach 160 million users: MSN Spaces will reach 130 million users in only 18 months.

Windows Live Spaces in the news

Lives Spaces has been big in the news over the past day or two – Mike Torres has a good summary of the main points. If you’d like to read the full stories yourself, there are reports on CNET, PC Magazine and WindowsITPro (Paul Thurrott).

Live Spaces – not far away now until the big change

From lots of news stories about Spaces, it seems we won’t have to wait much longer for the big changeover to Windows Live Spaces. Perhaps next week… see Thomas J.’s space, or the middle of August according to Paul Thurrott.

Tags: Windows Live Spaces, MSN Spaces, social networking

Better maps for Live Local Australia

Well, the road maps are much better after the update the other day although they seem to be the same we saw in Microsoft’s Maps and Directions – check the old railway line still appearing in Stanhope (local historians had better print that page so there’s a record of the line before development occurs and future mappers don’t mark it).

Sydney now has a zoom level down to 100 m so you can get lots of detail. Interestingly the buildings in the Sydney CBD weren’t photographed directly from above so you view them from the side and can get an idea of how tall some are.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge doesn’t come out too well (again, it’s taken at an angle) but the Opera House is clear and spectacular. And the beaches, e.g. Bondi, are very clean, nobody is surfing but the water is very clear. If you live in Sydney, have lived there, or are preparing to do some sight-seeing, the Sydney maps are very informative in aerial view. We’ll have to wait for birds eye view…

Brisbane has a zoom level down to about 100 m too but poor ol’ Melbourne hasn’t got that zoom level as yet. However the road view now gives far more detail and you should be able to find your way around – driving directions certainly work and searches for hotels, restaurants, and so on, gives good results.

Finally, we’ll wait for better resolution aerial views around Rushworth…

For more info and some collections, see Windows Live Local Australia.

Live Mail update – new features

You’ve already seen from the way Live Mail loads that there has been an update. However you might not have done enough exploring to find all the new features:

• for those on a slow connection (i.e. on dialup), you can revert to the basic version of Live Mail
• you can print out your contacts list
• the Today page returns so you can check your storage, view your recently updated contacts and see who has updated their Space
• when you want to attach photos to a message, the photo upload tool (from Hotmail days and similar to that in Spaces) is now back.

For a full list of all the new features in the latest update, go over to the Live Mail team Space.

Live Mail and Live Local updated, Live Gallery available

webDotWiz is hereby breaking one of his rules of blogging – one topic per post. Time is pressing however but he’ll return to point out features of each in a day or two.

Live Mail has been updated to the next milestone in its development – you’ll soon notice when you load it.

Live Local maps have been updated to a higher level for Australia.

Live Gallery for add-ins to various Live services, e.g. add-ins such as the Windows Live Shared Maps for Messenger, which is great fun, has gone live.

Get to Windows Live Expo via Expo.org

You can get to Windows Live Expo (expo.live.com) via the shorter and easier to remember expo.org site name. So tell your family and friends you’ll be buying and selling at expo.org (when we in Australia have our own version of the service).

Tags (Technorati): Live Expo, Windows Live Expo

Microsoft officially announces Zune, a music and entertainment player

Microsoft has officially confirmed on Reuters that the company will be releasing a music and entertainment player to compete against the Apple iPod. See Zune Insider and Bink for the full details. A release date has not yet been announced.

For a quirky video, visit comingzune.com.

Tags (Technorati): Zune, music, music and entertainment player

Make money from your Space (selected countries at present)

The Space Craft (the Spaces team Space) has a post about some regions now being able to make money from their Space by signing up to the Amazon Associates Program and getting paid each time a visitor to your site buys a book from your Book List (only available in USA, Canada, UK, Germany, France and Japan). For USA and Canada Spacers only (at the moment), you can add the Sponsored Links module.

Windows Live QnA – next week

If you signed up to try out Windows Live QnA (Question and Answer), you should find an invite to begin using the service in your inbox next week. Full details are on the Windows Live QnA team Space.