"But, on Sunday, I abandoned My Space. I am no longer able to post new entries to the blogsite. I contacted MSN technical support, which to its credit responded late on a Sunday night (over a holiday weekend, no less) with suggested fixes: Clearing Internet Explorer's cache or setting security to 'medium.' My browser isn't the problem, because I can't post from other computers, either. Strangely, I could edit an existing post and use that to direct people to my new personal blogsite. The problem remains today."
I posted an e-mail message to Joe Wilcox about this but I neglected to mention to him that this last weekend was not a holiday in India I don't think. My experience with these farmed-out support services is that many of them have no control over anything. They can't reset a password, or even tell you for sure if a system is up or not, let alone tell you when to expect it back. At one point recently, unable to accomplish the electronic payment on a credit card I called to ask how long their system might be down. I was told to "try again in a few days". Very helpful.
Anyway, here is what I did tell Joe Wilcox about MSN Spaces:
I was rather puzzled by your endorsement of MSN Spaces, but rather than contact you, I just assumed that Jupiter Media may get a large part of its revenue from Microsoft or something, now that you've documented this glitch maybe I was wrong.
In any event, if your purpose is truly to watch Microsoft and not to just advertise for them you should probably point out publicly that:
(1) MSN spaces layout looks horrible by modern standards and is often so slow that you think it might be down.
(2) Spaces has a growing number of templates, but so does Blogspot (aka Blogger by Google) and the latter allows you to edit existing templates or create your own from scratch, something I figure Microsoft is unlikely to do.
(3) Spaces gives you 30 meg for uploading photos. Blogger gives you 300 meg.
(4) Blogger has an open API that allows you to create your own interfaces, not that I'm likely to do this, but other people are. My favorite is "BlogThis" which sits as a button on my bookmarks bar and allows me to quickly create a blog entry that point to another web page, leaving a space for me to add my own comments. Even if I want to create a blog entry that doesn't link to anything I still use this button and just clear the link field.
(5) Yahoo also has a blogging function now, that looks like it has a lot of potential particularly in working with other Yahoo functionality (Yahoo groups, etc.), I haven't worked with it enough to compare with the other two. Even AOL now has a free blogging service, as well as free 2 Gig e-mail (little publicized so far) that works off the same ID you have for AOL Instant Messenger. All of these services allow you to create a blog entry by sending an e-mail message, but the AOL service also allows you to create blog entries using IM, either the AOL instant messenger, the iChat interface on an Apple system or even an open source program such as Gaim, basically anything that is AIM compatible (officially or not). Of all these I think the "BlogThis" is unsurpassed in ease of use, with the exception of blogging from a cell phone or a department store, I can't imagine why anyone would want to use e-mail or IM to blog, other than just to say they had done so.
(6) Last but not least, at times some of the MSN Spaces features only worked with Internet Explorer. They didn't SAY this of course, because Microsoft's policy is usually to not acknowledge the existence of competitors, that way they don't have to answer those unpleasant interoperability questions. MS to State of Mass: "You mean you're not going to use OUR standard?!" This situation SEEMS to be improving as I have now been able to post using Firefox on an Apple machine, but now that you mentioned you are on an Apple too, or were, it occurs to me that any functionality on non MS software my be accidental and temporary. My guess is they just don't test. While they might not go out of their way to break Firefox or Apple, or Linux compatibility, they don't go out of their way to make sure it works either. In my case, sufficient cause to avoid all of their products.
Keep an eye on what AOL is doing with their free services. Within a year I predict they are going to be annoying the heck out of the others.
Why anyone would pay $14 a month for just a blogging service is a mystery to me. These days, that amount will get you a full multiple domain web "server" with e-mail, several Gigs of storage and more bandwidth than you are likely to use. Of course if you are a celebrity, or by some other means end up getting "a ton of hits" then there may be some limitations on the free blogging services (although I've never noticed any).
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