MSN Spaces Australia was tonight updated to include a new Social Networking trial which enables customers to communicate and connect in a more meaningful way with their friends and their friends of friends, read more below:

This week I’ve had the pleasure of hanging out in Sydney spending time with customers, partners, a bunch of cool bloggers as well as the folks from NineMSN who run our business down here.  As usual when I’m on the road its been a crazy busy week but have to say it’s not a bad place to be ~ and brings back some happy memories from when I used to live here.

One of the reasons to be here this week has been that we were getting ready to deploy our first social networking trial, specifically within the Australian market.   This new functionality is an extension to the existing Spaces service and is exposed as a module that one can add within one’s Space.  Our approach to social networking is designed to enable a way for customers to communicate and connect in more meaningful way with their circle of friends and in particular their friends and their friends’ friends.    We are doing this by adding this feature to our existing network be it Messenger, Spaces or Mail rather than build a unique social network.   That’s often a little different from other services and I’m interesting to see how things play out especially as My Spaces is doing pretty well in this market and just this week Yahoo launched their 360 service here.   All in all it’s getting interesting in this area.

Well this feature just went live!  Although the feature is only available to customers in Australia I did manage to setup a new Space to start playing around with new feature.  I have copied some screen shots to this blog entry and also a link to my Australian Space so folks that are interested can see some of the experence even if they aren’t in Australia.

One thing that we are very conscious of is that we need to put customers in control of their social network.  To add friends to their network customers need to invite them, either via an email address, a Messenger ID or their Space address and then the friends need to accept the invitation before they are included on the list.   Once added to the social network both the inviter and the invitee can decide what information they want to share and with whom by setting permissions in MSN Spaces.   One thing to note is that in author/edit mode you get to see all the friends that you have asked to be part of your network even if they are ‘pending’ yet if someone were to view your Space they only see the folks that have accepted your invitation.

One of the obvious questions is why are we doing this only in Australia?  Well at least it’s not only in the USA for a change!    Basically when we were looking for a trial market we wanted to find somewhere that had an active Spaces customer base, a mature MSN market and somewhere where we thought we would get lots of feedback good and bad.   Although many markets probably fit that bill we ended up choosing Australia and I can say I’m not complaining right now!    We don’t yet have dates for broad availability for other markets, much of that will depend on the learning’s from this trial.   So, Australian customers please try this, let us know what you think and help us get ready for broad availability.

In addition to the social networking trial this release of Spaces also includes some other minor features like a new banner ad in Australia & Italy, integration of Windows Live Expo in the USA, and then a new module that should be available globally that allows users to add RSS feeds to their MSN Space.

Via: Phil Holden’s Blog