Spaces Update – Oh Sh**

 

URL Changes

All MSN Spaces Users: Please note that your MSN Space’s URL will change on June 5, 2006. As part of investments in the improvement of MSN Spaces, it we will be migrating all of the URLs from http://spaces.msn.com/<NAME> to http://<NAME>.spaces.msn.com. (For instance, instead of http://spaces.msn.com/thespacecraft/ you will now see http://thespacecraft.spaces.msn.com.) On and after June 5th, all viewers and users going to the "old" URL will be automatically redirected to the new URL. In addition, your MSN Messenger/Windows Live Messenger buddies will also be automatically directed to the new URL when they click on your contact card to view your Space. We want to assure you that all of your data and information will remain intact, and we apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause. Sincerely, The MSN Spaces Team

 

May 25

More info on the URL Changes

Everyone thank you so much for your feedback, because of the comments we have read in The Spacecraft Greg Phipps one of our rock star Spaces Program Managers had this to say!      “Spaces has grown very quickly into one of the Web’s mega services. So quickly in fact that we just passed the 100MM user mark and have had to do some architectural changes to ensure that Spaces can be deployed in multiple data centers. We needed to deliver a system that allows for Spaces to be distributed across multiple data centers without requiring a URL that included the data center name. How unkewl would that be? Can you imagine telling your friends and family that the URL to your space was http://cluster25.dc1.spaces.msn.com/gphipps?   So we have developed a DNS (Domain Name System) based solution that allows us to redirect requests to the right data center and allows us to keep a better looking URL. Moving the Space name into the domain name is a requirement of that.   We also heard the pain we created for our users with the URL change made in our release in January and to help mitigate this upcoming name change we have worked with the following companies to proactively address the associated ranking issues:   Technorati Weblogs Feedster PubSub.com Bloglines Ask.com   In addition, we have dialogues with the following search engine companies   Live Search Yahoo Google   I can’t promise that this will be a completely seamless transition; but rest assured we are working hard to make this as seamless as possible.   Doing the rearchitecture work and making the move to Live Spaces was not possible for a number of technical reasons. This is why we can’t move straight to the spaces.live.com name. However, we believe that when we do move to Live Spaces that will be the last time we have to change the URL. This really isn’t something we decided to do lightly. We have had to make a ton of tradeoffs from both a technical perspective and the impact to our users.”