Spaces and lock out/in

Dare Obasanjo, listens in with a vanity search, either with PubSub, Feedster or Technorati, as I do, as everyone should. I found his post in my Radio aggregator's emails in Thunderbird today, in my PubSub feed for "Steve Hooker." And left this comment at his site.

I don't use any instant messenger apps. Just ain't keen on them, though I have AOL IM and ICQ in case of emergencies. Will AOL be able to post to Spaces? Yahoo? Other IM/chat apps? I supposed I should have said "locked out."

Now that I don't use my Hotmail account because I needed to log in via Passport too many times and, frankly, I kept forgetting my details. I notice that to post a comment in Spaces I have to log in via Passport. Well, I guess that the comment spam problem is so pervasive that this is an unfortunate necessity these days. I know TypePad uses their own TypeKey for the same problem. I don't suppose there's a way for me as a rival blog hoster, to cut into Passport for comments? TypeKey's supposed to be open to other apps, though I haven't really looked into it.

I'm a Userland Manila developer. Comment spam is a problem, but I have my own cooked solution for it, sure it is an ongoing war. However, there is no 'Manila' authentication system. "You come, you see, you comment." Much like this (Dare's 25hoursaday) site. It's open.

To create a Manila site, all that is needed is a valid email address. I don't keep that address, only your site knows it, as it'll need to notify the owner when new stuff is posted.

Overall, I am worried about the potential you guys have for lock-in, indeed lock-out. Maybe I'll be proved wrong, but I see AOL's Journals and your Spaces becoming unblogs. I post my music, pix and everything else into my reverse chrono, and still manage to put some postings into a side bar. I also upload regular pages. It's all 'me and mine' stuff. I'll still call it blogging, though Manila and Radio is more like personal content management. I think you calling them Spaces will be your way of doing 'it' your way, away from the rest of the semi-open blogosphere.

I pride myself on the openness of my system, that users can export and download their entire site and move to another hoster. That they can connect via the blogger API, metaWeblogger API, Manila API. That they can post anything legal. That, THEY own their text and images, it's their site—I just host it. I try not to lock-in.

Your (Dare's) post about APIs had me thinking that you'll be integrating Word, Outlook and possibly MSIE into Spaces. A good blog editing tool is missing right now. Will MS fix that? Will it be open?

Dare seems to be saying that Spaces will be better than blogs, "...It's supposed to be a person's personal space online which was the original vision of personal publishing on the Web which spawned the personal homepage revolution a couple of years ago. Weblogs are the next iteration of that vision and we expect MSN Spaces to be the refinement of that iteration."

I worry that MS has already locked out iTunes, AOL Messenger, ICQ, maybe later, even Firefox, Nokia, Google (and me) out. Well, it's just business.

[Update: 07/12/04; 10:59:15] Dare replied, "As for blog editing tools, there are currently no plans I am aware of for us to produce something like this in the near future. Of course, if we get lots of feedback from customers requesting such tools then we'll reconsider."

It'll be coming. Users want it. Everybody complains about the WYSIWYG editing or raw HTML editing that's so primitive in browsers, even with today's widgets. Most of my longer posts are done with Radio, where I have much more flexibility, as I write, and even here, it just ain't as good as Word—no images to wrap around, not much WYSIWYG.