Features

MSN Spaces Tops Blogging Service Worldwide

By Sophia Mayengbam

MSN Spaces, Microsoft free blogging platform, launched in December 2004, has taken of in a big way in less than two years of its existence. According to a data released by comScore Networks Inc., an independent Internet audience measurement and consulting company, MSN Spaces is the most widely used blogging service worldwide with more than 100 million unique visitors.

The aim of the platform is to make the process of blogging simple and straightforward affair, and offers various themes to suit users’ style. It is incorporated with MSN Messenger 7 with other people's spaces appearing in their contacts. The idea and design of the website is a great hit with the bloggers.

comScore World Metrix’s proprietary audience report for April 2006 showed the total number of unique visitors to MSN Spaces has more than doubled in the past 12 months, from 41.65 million to 101 million. Figures compiled by comScore Media Metrix indicate that during April 2006, nearly one in seven Internet users worldwide had visited MSN Spaces.

“Blogging as a category has shown consistent and rapid growth over the last year all around the world and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon,” said Peter Daboll, CEO of comScore Media Metrix. “The trend in more user-generated content represents a shift in the way that media is created and consumed online.”

MSN Spaces allows consumers to create personal Internet sites where they can express themselves in a variety of ways and interact with the important people in their life. The service provides people with a place to create and update a Web log, or blog, as well as share photos, music playlists and more. For example, more than 6 million photos are uploaded to the service each day, with more than 2.5 billion photos uploaded since its launched as a beta service.

 “Consumers are enjoying MSN Spaces in record proportions as they embrace the ability to more easily share their stories and stay in touch with the people they care about most,” said Moz Hussain, group product manager at Microsoft Corp. “As more people discover how easy this service is to use and how it enables them to share so many different things with the people they care about most, we’re confident that MSN Spaces will continue as the world’s most popular blogging destination.”

Microsoft said it MSN Spaces will be renamed Windows Live Spaces, with additional features including a social networking service and the ability for developers to create gadgets, new features developed by hobbyists and partners, that can be added to a Space by users. MSN Spaces will change all of the URLs for the site. Instead of spaces.msn.com/Name, they will read Name.spaces.msn.com.