MSN Spaces

Funkstop

so i finally got around to setting up an MSN Space and have put it under the same name as The Funk Stop

Overall, MSN makes it very easy to set up initially, but its way too cluttered (i have this complaint for MySpace too…).
there’s way too much to do but the main prob is that everything is msn. Similar to the backend server market, MS wants to lock me in, but i already have all my pics up on flickr or dot photo. so I want to be able to use those sincethere is no way that i want to start using a third site for hosting pics.

no avatar – well i can use an msn space one i think, but i want to use my existing one – avatar – I’m sure i’m missing something here, because this seems like a basic feature to have.

there’s also no way to link into my yahoo finance pages – i’ve been using these since the 90’s (man, it sound wierd to say that…) and it ain’t broke, so no need to fix it… I know this is not really something that people would display to others, but I still want to link to it from the same pages when I’m editing my space so that if i want to reference or highlight a stock pick, i can – mind you no one else is really doing this either…

but ‘fixing’ brings me to the lists:

  • You get a choice between a book list, custom list, and a blog list
  • from what I can tell, there is no real difference between a custom list and blog list – just labeled differently. It’s not really ‘custom’ since it only allows you to manipulate contents of fields, would be better you could actually pick and choose fields themselves
  • book list takes advantage of amazon to populate info, but doesn’t really make use of web services or allow a user to specify an amazon account.
  • viewing lists is also difficult – you have to pick from a drop down box – very 1999
  • no way direct way to link a blog to an item in the book list

    • basically MSN Spaces seems like a glorified personal portal but without any of the useful webservices that are out there.

    But i do know that these are early days for MSN and that a lot of work is going into their ‘Live’ initiative so I’m sure a lot of these issues will get resolved – until then though, I think i’ll just let my MSN Spaces be an empty void…

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