Microsoft sees blogs for the masses

Microsoft Corp.'s MSN Internet division last night introduced a preliminary version of MSN Spaces, a new service that includes a tool for publishing weblogs, online journals commonly known as blogs. The tool is less flexible than many existing blog-publishing services, but it's meant to be easier to use.


The company that helped push word-processing and graphical computing into the mainstream wants to do the same thing with weblogs.

Microsoft Corp.'s MSN Internet division last night introduced a preliminary version of MSN Spaces, a new service that includes a tool for publishing weblogs, online journals commonly known as blogs. The tool is less flexible than many existing blog-publishing services, but it's meant to be easier to use.

The service isn't likely to appeal to hard-core bloggers, and some analysts have mixed feelings about its prospects. But MSN executives say the approach should boost the interest in weblog publishing well beyond techies and enthusiasts to a much broader base of users.

"This is for the masses," said Blake Irving, an MSN corporate vice president. He predicted that the new MSN Service will expand the blogging category "at a pace that has not been seen before."

The service is free to the user, but it ties into Microsoft's strategy of driving traffic to the broader range of MSN services, which make money from subscription and advertising revenues. As with other free MSN services, such as Hotmail, publishing via MSN Spaces requires registration, which lets Microsoft identify users in such a way that advertisers on MSN can target their ads more effectively, and MSN can collect more money from those advertisers.

MSN Spaces "is another reason for an end user to have a registered relationship with us," Irving said.

The service marks the company's first foray into the blogging market. But Microsoft isn't the first company to try to make blogs more mainstream. MSN Spaces will compete with established weblog publishing tools including LiveJournal, AOL Journals, TypePad and Google-owned Blogger.

Yet Microsoft is positioning MSN Spaces as more than a blogging tool. As its name implies, the service is meant to provide users with their own, easy-to-establish "space," or site, on the Web. Apart from a section for a weblog, people can use the space to present slide shows of their personal photos or lists of their favorite books or music.

The top of each MSN Spaces site will also contain four text-based advertising links.

"It's an interesting new service," said Matt Rosoff, analyst at research firm Directions on Microsoft. But Rosoff said he doesn't see it attracting a huge market. Even if Web publishing is made easier, he said, it will continue to appeal primarily "to a certain type of person," not the wide range of people drawn to one-to-one communications tools such as instant-messaging and e-mail.

However, Microsoft is seeking to boost the interest in MSN Spaces by connecting it to two of its existing mass-market services, Hotmail and Messenger, which have 187 million and 145 million worldwide users, respectively.

MSN Messenger 7.0, the latest version of the instant-messaging program, was released in preliminary form yesterday with a slate of new features, including some directly tied to MSN Spaces.

One, called "gleaming," highlights the contact icons of people who have updated their MSN Spaces sites, letting their instant-messaging buddies know when there is new content to view.

In addition, as part of a newly unified contact storage system, contact cards in Messenger and the MSN Hotmail e-mail program will reflect portions of a particular contact's MSN Spaces site and let someone else connect directly to that site.

The improvements in the latest MSN Messenger version go beyond the ties to MSN Spaces. They include new methods of getting the attention of other users: "winks," animations that pop up on an instant messaging screen; and "nudges," which shake another person's active instant messaging window and alert them with a sound.

Microsoft also plans to let outside companies offer "theme packs" for MSN Messenger for the first time, letting users buy packages of special backgrounds, icons, pictures and winks.

MSN's Irving said prices for the theme packs will probably range from somewhere around 50 cents to $1.50 -- tapping into the trend toward online "micropayments."

Another new MSN Messenger feature illustrates one way that Microsoft will try to build market share in the search-engine battle with Yahoo! and Google: Users will be able to launch an MSN Web search from the Messenger program by highlighting words and right clicking, or by typing words into an integrated box.

But Microsoft's entry into the blogging market, via MSN Spaces, is likely to draw the most attention for now, owing in part to its potential impact on the nascent weblog industry. Many of the existing players are smaller companies and individuals who have created publishing software and related programs for others in the "blogosphere," as the weblog community is known.

Many other existing blogging services appeal to the technically adept by letting them tweak the underlying HTML code to significantly alter the appearance of their weblog pages. MSN's simpler approach gives people a variety of templates and lets them adjust the position of sections on their pages, but it doesn't let them go under the hood to do any major overhauls.

MSN Spaces is "not quite as full-featured" as many existing weblog programs, but it appears very easy to set up, said Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li.

For many people, she said, the key selling point will be the ability to easily post photos. It will also be possible to update an MSN Spaces site remotely, via e-mail or mobile phone.

The blogging function of MSN Spaces comes with many traditional weblog features, such as sections for comments under each blog post. MSN Spaces also lets users send out streams of data, known as RSS feeds, which let others bring the contents of a weblog into a type of program called a news aggregator, for convenient reading alongside content from other news sites and weblogs.

The service will also let people control who can access their site. Options include opening the site to the world or limiting access to contacts on a buddy list or a select group of family and friends.

On the Net: spaces.msn.com
P-I reporter Todd Bishop can be reached at 206-448-8221 or toddbishop@seattlepi.com