Windows Live wave 3 brought great improvements to live.com, and was part of my motivation for hosting this blog on Spaces (which has only been updated slightly).  But I am starting to regret it.  Here’s my top 5 reasons why:

1. I set up a domain for the blog (http://silverlightforbusiness.net) but this just gets redirected to the standard spaces url (in my case: http://blackburnian.spaces.live.com/) – this is a problem because I lose a bit of identity for the blog, and because spaces.live.com is blocked in many corporate networks as a social networking site.  I have seen this is the last two clients I visited.  My blog can be made as an exception in their proxy servers, but it obviously limits visibility to many corporate clients.  Why can’t the domain just stay as the one I have chosen, in the way that Wordpress and Tumblr do (for example my http://backofabeermat.co.uk site is hosted on tumblr but that domain never changes, and ironically is often visible in corporate networks)
2. The statistics provided by spaces are terrible.  A paged table with columns that aren’t wide enough, only next and previous buttons (no jumping to a particular page), poor amount of data, no export, poor amount of summary data.  Really this is pretty lame; looks like something someone produced at the last minute.  Can we have something on the lines of the stats provided by SubText or at least an answer to the next point.
3. Limited customisation.  OK I can do plenty with colours and layout, which is all ok, but I can’t embed any scripts – so using an analytics script to mitigate point 2 appears out of the question. Even using Microsoft’s own scripts from adcenter are not allowed.
4. Limited blog.  Again I can’t embed things I want to embed.  You can include pictures and videos  It would be nice to include Silverlight in a blog called Silverlight for business, but this is not possible currently AFAIK Just found out that you can do this using an IFrame from Silverlight streaming at least – yes!
5. No Search – my users can’t search my blog.  Can we have a search please?
6. Categories – why can I only have one category per entry? (ok that’s 6 but I just remembered this one and it really bugs me, and 4 has been somewhat mitigated…

I am hoping that there is an update for Spaces on the way – but I haven’t heard anything about that.  At the moment there is a possibility that the current setup is going to harm potential business by reducing it’s visibility, and that is obviously not acceptable.  So if anyone has any pointers or hints on solutions to the above, I would love to hear them!

Cheers

Ian