Microsoft plans with Spaces, Messenger, and Hotmail

Microsoft does great work with integrating services. They integrated their web browser in their operating system, which ended up killing the competition and a practical demise of the Netscape Browser. Their efforts with integration of media player are not that successful with Winamp and other free music software still ruling the music player market. Their latest plans are however emerging in the online market.

They have launched a public beta of their upcoming MSN Messenger which is somewhat integrated with MSN Spaces. You get access to your contact’s latest Blog posts from their contact cards. Even hotmail is now integrated with MSN Messenger. Hotmail shows a drop down with the online MSN Messenger contacts. Moreover, with integration with the MSN Web Messenger you can get in touch with messenger friends from hotmail directly without downloading the software itself.

The best thing is that people are endorsing MSN Spaces. Maybe it is the honeymoon period. However, some people just might find MSN Spaces a little more familiar to start blogging compared to Blogger. I have seen some good Blogs coming up already and with integration to images, the Spaces page is somewhat more exciting than plain Blog pages.

Looks like there is enough space for MSN Spaces with already existing competition from Blogger, LiveJournal and other services.