MSN Spaces Gets Upgraded

We got our MSN Spaces improvements today, and Mike Torres has the 411 on what's changed:

• Weblogs.com pinging: Thanks in large part to the work Dave & team did to improve the reliability of Weblogs.com, and some minor tweaking and testing of our implementation, our success rate has jumped from about 0-5% during our first week to close to 100% today. This means more and more of your content will start being syndicated around the web (if you have a public space and have Weblogs.com pinging turned on).
• MSN Search results: Due to a goof-up on our part involving the infamous robots.txt file, the search results for spaces have been a little wonky (oops). This will start to heal itself.
• Blog edit layout: A bunch of people had been kind enough to alert us of what appeared to be a security issue – but was actually just a layout bug (you know who you are! Thanks for looking out!) After today, you don’t have to worry about this happening again.
• Mobile publishing: This is somewhat of a corner case, but it is a big deal to Microsoft employees and other gadget geeks around the world. Posting an image from the (phenomenal) Audiovox SMT5600 phone via email now works without having to have text in the body of the mail; just a photo will do.
• “Space not available”: Some of you may have been receiving “Space not available” errors if you setup a space during the first 24 hours the service was live. This problem should now be fixed, and the likelihood of getting into this state on sign-up again is much, much lower. The one gotcha is that if you had one of these spaces, you will have to go into Settings: Permissions and reset your space to Public (or whichever setting you like best.) If you are still seeing this error, please send us Feedback using the link at the bottom of the page and we will look into it.
• Sign-in/out: We made some updates that will help improve that pesky sign-in/sign-out issue in places like the comments area. If you don’t know what I am talking about, don’t worry about it. It was harmless – but it was pretty darn annoying, so we fixed it.
• Usability: It is now easier to get into “author” mode from “preview” mode on your own space. Just click “Customize” in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, where “Preview my space” is usually shown.
• A bunch of other random fixes: Without going into too much detail, there were other little things we did to improve your experience with Spaces.

Good stuff. I don't think anyone was expecting the a revolution a week in, but it is so refreshing to see quick fixes. Some Blogger bugs never seem to go away. If this is going to become the new status quo at MSN, with fixes every few weeks, it won't be long before everyone is singing their praises.
(via Scoble)