Quick impressions of Microsoft's new MSN Spaces. I set up my own space as a trial:

• It is unfair to call MSN Spaces a 'blogging tool. They really seem to be going more for a community-building tool. Sharing photos, music, and "lists," as well as 'blogging
• The list concept strikes me as a bit muddy. MSN Spaces seems to allow three kinds of lists currently: blogs, books, and custom. Making a list of type "blog" allows you to enter a name, description, and a URL. Lists just seem to be lists of links. No RSS / ATOM auto discovery. I'm not sure why I'd actually be motivated to make a list. I do enough of that at work.
• The concept of a "friends list" or news aggregator seems to be entirely missing. This is odd. I would have thought that this kind of a think is a no-brainer.
• The journal/'blog features allow trackbacks and comments, but the comments are single-level; you can't reply to a comment, or have a conversation. Again, threaded discussions seems like an obvious community building feature. Comments don't seem to have RSS feeds.
• It is entirely possible that aggregation and threaded discussions are missing because MS wants you to go somewhere else within MSN to do this.
• The photo album feature is reasonably cool, though right now I prefer the way Flickr does photo albums. MSN Spaces allows you to upload photos and organize then into albums. It also has a slide show feature. Note that photo uploading only seems to work on Windows PCs (done with ActiveX). Slide shows seem to be cross-platform.
• While messing with MSN Spaces, I was having confusing problems with session state. I'd suddenly be logged out, options to create blog entries would be missing. Maybe this has something to do with using Safari on MacOS X. I tried to use some of these functions, but it was too slow. I'll try again later.
• Kudos to Microsoft for writing most of MSN spaces to work with browsers other than IE on Windows, by the way. Some parts are IE-only: photo albums, for example.
• Big, glaring problem (for me, at least): I don't see any support for editing the 'blog with external tools. One of the really nice things about the way blogging software has evolved is the editor APIs. I prefer to edit entries in a native tool on my desktop, the zap it to the server. This also makes cross-posting far easier. Microsoft should really consider supporting some kind of editing API (Blogger, ATOM).
• Initial support for RSS in the 'blog is good; it would be cool to see support in the playlist, list, and photo album functions, too.
• It would be cool to see what kind of clever ways MS could integrate MSN Spaces features with Hotmail.

So, all in all, a good start for Microsoft, particularly with the integrated photo hosting features. Even so, I can't imagine that LiveJournal, Blogger, or Flickr customers will be wooed away in large numbers.