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by Josh Baltzell.
Original Post: My adventures in free Microsoft apps (New Hotmail, MSN Messenger 7, MSN Spaces)
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This is really not bad at all. I guess I should not be surprised since MS has been doing a great job supporting and using blogs. There is an RSS feed for each blog, there is a “Blog This” button on each post so you can post about it on your own space and the interface for posting a blog is right there with .TEXT because it uses either the same or a similar text editor.
Beyond the blog portion there is a place to upload photos, show off your terrible taste in music, books and anything else you might want to make a list of. Overall I have to say that this is a great app especially for Beta. I won't use it, but it is still great and I will suggest it to friends and family once it goes gold.
There are some cool things that seem like they will be cool when they get fully integrated. I will have to get some friends to install it to play with some things like the winks (seem to be stolen from 3 Degrees http://www.threedegrees.com), and a new feature called nudge. I like it because My smoking pal at work and I tell each other when it's time to smoke and that could be a very quick way of doing it.
There is also built in hand writing that you can use even with a person on the old version of messenger, but it is pointless without a tablet.
As for interface features they seem to be trying hard to make it easier to customize the app. There are “Packages” that you can download that will change your background, display picture, and the link that seems to stick around on the bottom of all the chat windows. The emoticon interface has more options and lets you pin and unpin all the emoticons including custom ones. There are even links to a site where you can buy more of everything.
Now for the world's greatest new feature. When you open up a new chat window your chat history is displayed in greyed out text in the window. I hate it when I close one by mistake and have to dig out the history to find something I wanted. It doesn't happen often, but this is a great user interface improvement. Thanks MS!
Aside from some other user interface changes that still seem immature (The notification about someone signing in now shows a display picture, but like a lot of the Beta it looks like the graphics work is still unfinished) the only other feature I noticed were the Contact Cards. These show contact information and the log of the person you click on. They seem very basic now, but they do have a connection to the person's MSN Spaces site.
So yep, there is 250 meg of storage now. So I don't have to clean out my spam every single day anymore. Also the links do not open in those crappy framed browsers that say MSN on top anymore. Thank god! I have effectively moved to GMail now for my personal email and newsletters. I really don't know what would bring me back to using MSN/Hotmail as my primary again.
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