As many of my blog visitors know, I work on the Windows Live team with a particular focus on helping people find, connect, and keep in touch with their friends.  I’m really excited to share that we just completed the launch of our latest release of Windows Live Spaces including significant updates to the Spaces home / What’s New signed-in experience. 

What's New
The “What’s New” module now includes details on recent updates from your (two-way) WL Spaces “friends” and WL Messenger contacts.  The type of information in the details is:

• Photos – album title and thumbnails of up to five recently added photos
• Files – folder title and icons of up to five recently added files; you can hover to see the file name as a tooltip
• Blog entry – blog entry title and a text snippet from the
• Lists – list title and the number of items in the list
• Profile updates – a list of profile fields that were updated
• New friend – when a friend (or messenger contact) of yours adds a new friend, you see the new friend’s display name and a link to invite them to be your friend (if they’re not already your friend)

The What's New module shows up to ~25 items, but you can also click the "What's New" module header to view a full What's New page with ~100 items. 

Other Features
Some other changes that we’ve made to the Spaces home include:

• Upcoming birthdays are also in the What’s New module. 
• Recent comments now includes comments on your photos and guestbook and the module was moved above the fold
• Invites to new Windows Live Events now show-up in the “Welcome module”
• There’s a link to our Community page in the top right
• New features are highlighted at the bottom of the middle column

My Favorite :)
My personal favorite part about the Windows Live “What’s New” info is that ALL of my friends' updates show up.  It’s automatic and deterministic.  What I mean by this is that it’s “automatic” in that I don’t need to go through and subscribe to every single one of my friends’ feeds, they just show-up.  When I add a new friend, the friend’s content updates start showing-up and when I remove a friend, their updates stop showing-up.  Similarly, it’s deterministic in that I can be confident that when I upload photos, when friends view their What’s New, they’ll see the photos.  (Up to 5 updates per friend, up to 100 updates total.) 

A note about privacy
On the flip side, if you don't want your content updates to show-up, you can turn them off by going to Options | Space Settings and then un-checking the box: "Show information from my Windows Live space on my contact card, and use gleam to indicate there's something new."  As it says, this will also turn-off your "gleams" in Windows Live Messenger.  Also, the only people who get your updates are those who are Friends or Messenger contacts AND who can view your space, so if you limit who can view your content, you'll also be limiting who will get your items in their What's New.  Finally, since your updates come from your two-way Windows Live Spaces friends and your Messenger contacts, if you don't want a particular individual to get your updates in their What's New, you can remove them as a friend and/or Messenger contact.  At the bottom of the What's New module, there are links to both "Manage friends" for removing and also "Invite friends" for adding.

Thanks to the team
Since joining the Spaces team about a year and a half ago, I've been lucky to have the opportunity to work on the Spaces home experience with some very talented people and credit for the latest features goes not only to our front-end team including Deepa, Khalid, Duane, Tony, Jason, Mike, Kirsten, Todd, and Penny; but there have been some great folks working on the back-end team that have also helped to make the latest improvements to the Spaces home a reality including Dare, Paul, Inder, Diego, Tony, and Joyce. 

For a bit of Spaces history, going back to the launch of MSN Spaces and its "gleams" integration with MSN Messenger, it's been almost 21 dog years of features and improvements to help our users catch-up with their friends.  The most recent evolution of the Spaces home / What's New has included:

• Addition of "What's New" module in November 2006: http://thespacecraft.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!8AA773FE0A12B9E3!28783.entry 
• New Spaces home page in April 2007: http://thespacecraft.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!8AA773FE0A12B9E3!34590.entry
• Redesigned Spaces home page in July 2007: http://thespacecraft.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!8AA773FE0A12B9E3!37301.entry

I hope you enjoy the latest improvements to the Spaces home experience and I actively welcome your feedback and suggestions for future improvements.  Please leave a comment.  Thanks very much--
--Rob