k*spot @ work

This morning I was driving into work and caught an interesting story on NPR's Morning Edition. The story was an interview with Lucy Kellaway, a Financial Times columnist, who was advising people to not social network with your boss because of the implications on your career as ultimately your boss does hold your employment fate in their hands and it's not the best idea for your boss to see your drunken weekend party pics in your online profile.

 

Now, as someone who works in the social networking software industry (or really software in general), I found the interview to be really funny - because though I *think* twice about putting some pictures up, certainly I'm a lot more relaxed about befriending peers or managers in my company because I feel like the company is more tolerant; and my participation in these networks is somewhat expected. Absolutely I care about my image and how my co-workers might percieve me, but I wouldn't hesistate to have my boss as my friend on any social networking site.

 

It makes me wonder then, how do other people really feel about it? Is your boss your friend on WL Spaces, Facebook, Myspace, etc? Does your boss know where your profile is on any of these sites?

 

Admitted, I've been uh...a bit lazy when it comes to posting lately (my last entry was in august )

 

Ever since we started the Spacecraft and have been regularly posting there as a team, I haven't been posting to this work blog as much as I should. I promise I'll be better :)

 

Anyway, today was a little bit of an upgrade when it comes to customization - new themes! finally, I know, even I was getting sick of the same themes over and over again.

 

I'm using "Light stream" - though my fave is probably "Street Graffiti" (Although...it is a bit phallic)

 

we're in the process of updating the Windows Live Spaces service - you might see some weirdness like things not loading completely or like the fonts showing up MASSIVE and all the wrong colors. This is NOT the new WL spaces so dont worry - i swear, its looking so much hotter than msn spaces ever did.

 

<update>3:30pm 8/2/2006 - we're in better shape now and working out the last of the kinks.

Remember when you were trying to add modules and the list was this horrible mish-mash of add-remove-hide-create-add-hide-create-what the heck? Yeah, it was kind of a mess.  Thanks to Jason, our development manager, who stepped it up (or maybe it annoyed him so much it drove him to help fix it?) we looked at solving the following problems

Not that we've figured it all out (and in fact, we're working with the live.com team to figure out what works and what doesn't between our add modules and their 'add stuff') but we're trying out a revamped version of the module picker. This one is cleaner - yeah, there are like a million of the same icon (hey, it was last minute and getting icons is suprisingly hard around here) - when its greyed out means you already got it, when its in color means you can add/create it. Your modules is where the stuff you've added but hidden (by clicking the X in the module header top right corner goes) making it easier to figure out where stuff went, rather than trying to sift through an unsorted list of add remove hide create.

 

Tell us what you think! The feedback you give is important to what we'll improve the next time around

So every release I talk about themes - in the past we've had a couple different designers work with us on them and they come out looking...unique...I mean, I've said this before but everyone has their own taste and there really is something for everyone. There are some themes (ahem space nebula) that I absolutely despise even though it was done by Larry, one of my favourite designers, in the UK. I personally know like 5 different people who used that theme and really, I can't understand why.

 

Anyway, with the launch of Windows Live Spaces (WL spaces for short), we decided to punch up our existing themes - firstly in case you hadn't noticed, we're now wider. Yep, no more teensy-tiny 800x600 (also known as "Why is there that ugly big gap on the right side of my screen?") and secondly, we're now centered within your screen (also known as "Why is my space all smushed up to one side of the screen?") - with all that we needed to revamp the themes that are already out there and being used. Additionally, some of the color choices were just tired and tacky looking which has been bugging our designers forever, so they went nuts in making the themes look polished and sexy.

 

Nothing - consider this your upgrade from economy to first class. Whatever you were using under MSN Spaces will still be your theme choice in Windows Live Spaces, just a better version of it. Seriously, the themes look SLICK. So if you've been using the same theme for ever, hey why not try something new?

 

You can now choose your theme by going to Customize and clicking on the Themes tab. We also heard you guys complaining on how annoying it was that the picker closed every time so trying out a new theme meant you had to click the themes link again just to make the picker show. Now we leave it open for you to try out different themes before you commit to one (don't forget to click Save in the Yellow bar)

 

Still works. I'm all about the caution tape theme (under patterns) with the background turned off. The black headers is HOT.

 

Well sort of. Remember when you had a dark background and the delete icons had this jagged look around them or you couldn't see them because the delete icon was black and uh, so was the background? We've now got different sets of icons depending on your theme. There are a bunch of other places where we'll be doing the icon swap so that you get a better experience depending on the theme you've chosen.

 

Ok for those of you who have no idea what 1024x768 or 800x600 means, it basically means how much you can fit or see on your screen (see wikipedia) - the higher the numbers the more lines of pixels that are supported and therefore the more you can fit on your screen. Looking at general web statistics we know that most users are now using a resolution of at least 1024x768 these days so we're now optimizing around that. When we first launched it was 800x600 (and these are worldwide averages) which is why we used to be 800x600. We know that lots of people's monitors support higher resolutions but there's reasoning behind the optimization:

 

The thing you have to remember is just because your monitor supports nine billion gajillion, doesn't mean that your friends or the people who are viewing your space can. So you go and customize your space exactly how you want it, but it totally doesn't display even remotely close to that on your friend's screen. What good is that? The idea is that what you decide your space to look like will be exactly what your friends see. So like just cuz you can fit 5 columns on your live.com page (as an example, since spaces doesn't offer that) and still be able to read all the text, doesn't mean that your poor friend Joe can show the 5 columns and still see your content. What we ARE thinking about is making the columns take up more space if there is more space. So you still have your 3 columns but they display more content if there's room on your screen, and on Joe's screen he'll see 3 columns too, they just might not be as wide.

 

Hope you like the themes!

It's about time Spaces got an upgrade, don't you think?

 

As someone who has been on this team and working on Spaces for what seems like FOREVER, its really exciting to see all of this come together and launch as Windows Live Spaces. I'm not going to go into all of the changes that have happened (checkout the spacecraft - our team's blog for all that because I'm sure there will be a laundry list of entries about everything that has happened) but here's a little history on how we got here.

 

I remember back in the day when MSN used to make all the sites use this totally hideous thing called the 'sharkfin' and the sharkfin only came in the approved MSN colors (also known as boring and really lame). We all hated the idea of using the sharkfin because this wasn't just another MSN site with MSN generated content, this was MY stuff and MY personality. Anyway, it pays to be someone who works on the product AND uses the product too, because in the end we managed to compromise and get away with no sharkfin and no standard colors, just a bit of branding for MSN and Spaces.

 

There was some fallout of that decision though, and that was that we had all this 'free/empty space' at the top of the space which we off course ended up throwing a bunch of stuff up there such as signing up for alerts (if you're in a supported market), RSS, tell a friend, search spaces etc. You can imagine that area ended up being jammed packed of 'stuff' and the UI model we had back when we first launched just wasn't working anymore. We got a lot of complaints from users that they weren't able to get their space the way they wanted because there was just too much 'stuff' up there and didn't feel like they had too much ability to customize their space as much as they wanted.

 

It's this interesting thing in software development in having to make tradeoffs - we could add all sorts of new functionality but sort of wedge it into the interface, OR we could do a major redesign (which is a lot of work, I'll get to that later) but not do as many new features or add functionality. Thankfully we were able to prioritize both this release so that we could give our users both - a better interface AND more functionality/performance in time for our launch.

 

We've made a lot of thoughful decisions into how to restructure the interface - we're now at a place where we think the model will be scalable and grow with the product for all the new features we'll be rolling out in future releases. Getting here wasn't easy and changing the way things looks isn't as easy as it seems - moving some pixels and pictures around should be easy, right? Not so much!

 

We've got a great design team and usability team + all the feedback from loyal spaces users that have helped us shape the product into what it is today - and thats just to come up with the right user model to optimize around 'what are people trying to do'. Second is making a model that works internationally - for example, German words are typically something like 1.5 the length of english words. Asian characters are taller and wider than english character. It's one thing to design a product and think that it will 'fit' within the constraints of your design, its another thing to the realize that uhh, the button text is too long and gets cut off, or it just looks really stupid in other languages. Third is it takes time to make all these pictures and concepts into actual working code - thankfully we have an awesome dev and test team to make this happen.

 

We're really proud of this release because of not only a better interface, easier to use, cooler looking but also below the surface we've made a lot of changes to make spaces more performant and more extensible.

 

Anyway, thats enough of our story, on with the features! Check out the spacecraft for the run down on all the features.

 

Enjoy and let us know what you think!

 

 

 

hey folks - you should now be seeing your sponsored links. I've been in a class all day so I didn't get to blog about this earlier.

 

Thanks to the folks over at Kanoodle for their speedy response to this problem!