Scoble’s Link Blog

My favorite MSN Spaces feature, and the one reason why I haven’t killed this blog, is the photo album. I can browse through my drive, select the photo I want to upload, and snap, it’s online.

It’s not a perfect system. I wish I could display regular sized images better. But, it’s faster than most of the blogging or content management apps I’ve used before.

I’m an early adopter and I’ve continued experimenting with MSN Spaces because of one feature. Yes, one. Sure, I can list a whole set of things that I don’t like, such as shortened referrer log, no ink (yet, you’re workin on it, right? huh? huh? huh?), so far I can’t upload from WebcamNotes or Blink because of lack of API, the comments display is bizarre and confuses me every time I click on a comments link, not enough theme options for women over 20, and I could go on and on. The real point is that I’m an early adopter, I know MSN Spaces won’t be perfect because it’s new, and as long as MSN Spaces makes changes and responds I’ll keep using it. If it’s still the same way in a couple of months, I might rethink it.

You list a whole set of possible reasons as to why early adopters are possibly passing MSN Spaces by. The list is worth reviewing. However, I think it’s a more fundamental issue that can be broken into: who is your target user and how are you relaying product information to them.

If your ideal users for MSN Spaces are 11-year old girls, who happen to like butterflys, then are you showing them how they can use them in pre-teen and teen magazies? What about commercials during Gilmore Girls, 7th Heaven and other shows? How about a sponsored game on Neopets? Not all are practical, but they are worth considering to see what marketing holes exist.

If your ideal user is me, then I’d say you did a good version 1 of the product and now it’s time to mature the product.

(P.S. Mike, I learned about MSN Video from your blog. Perhaps I haven’t been looking where it’s been advertised. I’ll take a longer look at it, but on first glance it’s difficult to tell what the purpose of it is. Is it current news clips? No dates, so I’m not sure.)

Quote

MSN - Early adopters and "influencers"

Over the past few days there has been buzz throughout the blogosphere on Mark Lucovsky’s post about Microsoft and our apparent lack of ability to ship software.  While I could spend the rest of the year disputing his naive perspective, I figure it is best left up to people much smarter than me - namely Joshua, Omar, and Kevin.  Great posts, all three of them.

The one thing that I find somewhat insulting (OK, mini-rant) is MarkL’s lame attempt to compare Google to Windows Update - as if this is Microsoft’s only web-based software…  a service that keeps your OS up-to-date.  Wow, instant loss of credibility.  News flash: There are thousands of people who work in this place called MSN, shipping software through the web every single day of every single week.  From blogging and MSN Search to MSNBC… from online videos & music to web-based email and instant messaging. Want to compare "Google’s" software as a service model to something at Microsoft?  Don’t compare it to Windows, my man!

OK - with that off my chest…  the real reason for this post.

Some of the "fallout" from the debate was interesting.  In comment threads on Scoble’s blog and elsewhere, people were saying some interesting things about MSN:

• "No one uses MSN." (huh?)
• "It isn’t for us."
• "MSN on the whole is buggy, slow, and hard to use."
• "Oh yeah, I forgot about MSN."
• "MSN is playing catch-up to Google and Yahoo."
• "MSN isn’t cool, I would never use it."

Now, obviously I take some of that to heart.  So I wanted your opinion on how MSN can be better in the future at addressing the needs of early adopters, influencers, and "geeks".  You folks.  It is pretty obvious to those of us inside the MSN walls (yes, even us geeks) that we are shipping some very cool services for our customers.  But for some reason, services like Gmail and Yahoo’s Search APIs tend to get a lot more play amongst "sneezers" than things like Outlook Live! or MSN Video (which rock!)  Dare recently posted about this as well as part of a post on another topic.

So, why are early adopters sleeping on MSN?  Let me list a few possible reasons:

• Our logo is a butterfly.  Colored butterflies just aren’t cool.
• MSN isn’t a ‘fun word’ like Yahoo, Google, or Friendster.  It sounds too 1995.
• Our services sometimes seem dumbed down instead of "geeked up"… as if we are catering to the lowest common denominator.
• MSN’s brand is tightly coupled with AOL - n