Mary Jo Foley reports that Microsoft's MSN division is expected to take the wraps off its MSN Spaces blogging service this week.
MSN is expected to tout MSN Spaces as a direct competitor to blog-creation and hosting tools, such as Blogger, Blog*Spot, LiveJournal and TypePad. Microsoft also will position MSN Spaces as a way to allow users to more easily share photo albums and music lists, too, insiders said.
Some users have been speculating that MSN will allow users to post to their blogs via MSN Messenger 7, the latest version of Microsoft's consumer instant-messaging client, which is in beta now and due to ship in early 2005.
She continues…
Some industry watchers have said they consider Microsoft's move into blogging as a counteroffensive against MSN archrival Google. Earlier this year, Google purchased Pyra Labs, the San Francisco-based vendor behind the Blogger blog-authoring platform.
MSN also is beta testing a service called MSN Blogbot, which is a blog-search service. According to sources, MSN is not quite ready to release the final version of MSN Blogbot. MSN Blogbot and its sister product, MSN Newsbot, also in beta, both rely on Moreover Technologies Inc.'s aggregation engines.
More tools from more big players = more competition and elevates blogging overall. To quote Martha, “and that’s a good thing.”
