Kurt Shintaku's Blog

Y’know, I like MSN Spaces.  It’s a free, simple way for me to blog.  And I’m not really subject (sort of) to the critiquing of the monitors that lord over the poor individuals on http://blogs.technet.com where saying the wrong word can cause a reprimand.  (Take a look at the number of blogs that haven’t posted in ages and the last post reads, "I have moved my blog to MSN Spaces and will no longer be posting to this space."  (And to think I alomst moved my blog to the corporate blog servers!)

 

That being said, there’s some REALLY obnoxious things missing from MSN Spaces.  Here’s a small list of things that they really should at least be beta testing because it’s not terribly hard to implement.

 

1) SEARCH:  Where the heck is the search bar for my blog?  I attempted to use the "&powertoy=sandbox" backdoor feature of MSN Spaces (read my blog about MSN Spaces Powertoys for more info) to try to implement my own search bar in my blog but to no avail.  The amount of code necesssary to implement the feature exceeds the maximum characters allowed for HTML inclusion within the blog.  The lack of a search make no sense to me being that it would encourage the use of MSN Search.  Seems like a really sad oversight.

 

2) MAPS:  Why doesn’t MSN Spaces already provide geographical mapping of my blog?  Many people use feedmap.net or other geo-blog location services to show people where my blog is been written.  I would think that this would be an obvious feature considering it would encourage the usage of http://virtualearth.msn.com.  I could also use the mapping technology to identify locations that I’ve visited or paths/routes that I’ve taken.  Again, a terrible oversight.

 

3) REVIEWS:  Why can’t I create a blog entry and automatically deem it a "review" which would allow me to identify a rating, the type of review it is (restaurant, wine, dance club, etc.) and a pointer to a picture of the location.  Places like http://www.realtravel.com have made their entire existence on this feature – I don’t understand why this would be that hard to implement.

 

Apparently, I’m not the only one that believes there needs to be some improvement in MSN Spaces:  The Dev Manager of MSN Spaces blogged about some of his personal wishes.