Windows Live Spaces is now available in 51 countries in 25 languages. There have been 93 million spaces created since Spaces was released, and more than 111 million people a month use Spaces. More than 18 million photos a day are uploaded to Spaces, with over 4 billion photos added since day 1. And with that, here"s what all these people will be experiencing for the first time, in the most recent update:
- New Spaces home page: The first page after logging in will inform you on who has updated their space and who has added comments to your space. Roll over their picture to see who"s updated their photos, who"s posted a blog entry, and who"s added new lists.
- Messaging: Keep in touch with your Spaces friends and meet other people on Spaces by sending them messages by putting your cursor over their profile picture and selecting the "Send a message" link. You can also use the link in the Visitor tools module on a person"s space.
- Guestbook: Add the guestbook module and people visiting your space can leave comments with rich formatting, including images and video.
- Customization
- Custom background image: In the Customize menu under the Advanced tab, you can upload whatever picture you want from your computer and use it as the background of your space.
- Additional colors and themes: There are now more themes to choose from and an easy-to-use color picker. You can also change the fonts!
- Gadgets and Modules
- Size and style: Available from the Windows Live Gallery, most gadgets and modules can span the full width of a column, and you can now remove their borders or change their titles to whatever you want by clicking on the arrow in the right hand corner of the gadget or module when you are in Edit mode.
- Other cool stuff: You can have multiple modules (more than one version of the same gadget as well) at the top or bottom of your space that span all of the columns – perfect for your space title and tagline. And if you"re on someone else"s space and see a module you like, you can add it to your space by clicking the "+" sign in the upper-right corner of the module.
- Photos
- Managing your photos: There"s a brand new page for viewing and editing albums on your space.
- Viewing photos: There"s a new layout for the individual photo pages so it"s faster and easier to view your photos and see all of your comments at a glance.
- Mobile
- See at a glance the recent updates and comments on your space
- Add, delete, view, and browse your friends
- View profile information
- Lists
- Book/Music lists: Now you can show specific book/music lists on your spaces home page as well as see multiple results when searching for books/music on Amazon to create your list.
- Looks better in narrow view: We"ve make some improvements to make your lists look better when in narrow columns on your space.
- APIs and Feeds: We wanted to give you the ability to access your Spaces information from a variety of locations and services, so we added new RSS feeds and opened up our APIs to allow you more freedom. Note: Only spaces with permissions set to "public" can use RSS feeds and APIs.
- Enhanced contact updates preview: When you see a profile picture on Spaces, just put your cursor over the picture and you can see a lot more information about the person than ever before.