Is Windows Live Spaces doomed?

With the roll of Microsoft’s Windows Live Wave 3 of Software and Services, the Company is making some major changes to how it delivers it with some old favorites possibly taking a back seat. There are definitely some welcome changes, especially with the new Windows Live Hotmail that is much lighter and faster with improvements to search and organization of interface elements. One of the things that interest me the most is the direction of Windows Live Spaces. An interesting post by Mary Jo Foley suggest that Windows Live Spaces in its current state may remain that way going forward.

Quote: First, Microsoft is de-emphasizing Windows Live Spaces. Existing Spaces don’t disappear. But now Microsoft is repositioning the centralized Windows Live user profile areas as the revamped start.live.com sites. Users’ start.live.com page will look a lot like Facebook, with a centralized activity feed."

Read the entire post here

I find that strange that the Windows Live Team is not updating Spaces for Wave 3. Right now, the service is suffering from a number of issues: commentary spam (especially from China), performance and the fact that Windows Live Writer should be a web interface instead of this fat client that just times out every time you try to make a post to your blog. Yes, its one thing for them not to kill the service and existing Spaces, but to just to leave it hanging to create a FaceBook alternative seems like a weak desperate move that’s only going to backfire. I can understand having a social networking play, but at the same time, what made Live Spaces such a draw to me was the opportunity to have a way to express myself over the Internet through content I create about topics that matter to me. When you look at what a social network does these days as defined by Facebook, comment about stupidity, use small useless web applets, share a few photos and just waste part of your day on the web and share mash-ups, its kind of sad to see Microsoft heading in this same direction. The fact that partnership between Facebook and My Space is not included with Wave 3 says a lot about the endeavor of this new release.