Just My Rambling Thoughts

1.17.2005

MSN Spaces - another spam bucket

I'm watching with mild curiousity the small fire between Ed Brill's blog and the blog...er, "space"...of Jim Bernardo. It all started with Ed calling BillG on the carpet for his claim of 1 million users of MSN Spaces. While going to check out Jim's blog/space entry I noted the roll of "Updated Spaces" and noticed that about half the list I was looking at was very reminiscent of SPAM. Leave it to M$ to find a way to create SPAM Blogs. At least no one is forced to read them!

No wonder they've hit 1 million so quick. I'm sure that Spaces will be held in the same high esteem that Hotmail is.

posted by Ted at 4:22 PM

2 Comments:

  • How exactly do you classify "spam blogs" and how is Spaces contributing to this problem? Is it just that people are being creative with the titles of their space, which happen to show up in the Updated Spaces list?

    Thanks -
    Mike, LPM MSN Spaces
    http://spaces.msn.com/members/mike

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 6:48 PM  

  • Mike,

    I'm aware that the Updated and New Spaces lists are the names of the space and not the subject of an entry. At the point I looked at the Spaces homepage, about half of them looked like names that one would see as a sender of spam. For example, I just took a look at the Updated Spaces list and noticed the name HotDateToday. Looking at the user's space it sure comes across as much more of an advertisement that if I got in an email would be classified as SPAM.

    Looking at the similar lists on Blogspot, I don't see blog titles that jump out as appearing "artificial" as they did on the Spaces page. Maybe it's cynicism, or just that Spaces users are more "stream of consciousness" in their naming, but it is at the least curious.

    As to the question of how Spaces is contributing, I guess only time will tell since the site is new. At least with blogs, you can stop reading if you don't like what you find!

    By Blogger Ted, at 9:40 PM  

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