As you may already know, we released a bunch of minor updates today (note: more 'fix' than 'feature'!)  We have been closely monitoring your feedback (both around the blogosphere as well as in our own comments and email) in an effort to identify the things that were bugging you the most, and we didn’t want you to have to wait much longer for these updates with the holiday season rapidly approaching.  So we figured we might as well just do it now!

Here is a partial list of some of the updates we made:

• Weblogs.com pinging: Thanks in large part to the work Dave & team did to improve the reliability of Weblogs.com, and some minor tweaking and testing of our implementation, our success rate has jumped from about 0-5% during our first week to close to 100% today.  This means more and more of your content will start being syndicated around the web (if you have a public space and have Weblogs.com pinging turned on).
• MSN Search results: Due to a goof-up on our part involving the infamous robots.txt file, the search results for spaces have been a little wonky (oops).  This will start to heal itself.
• Blog edit layout:  A bunch of people had been kind enough to alert us of what appeared to be a security issue – but was actually just a layout bug (you know who you are!  Thanks for looking out!)  After today, you don’t have to worry about this happening again.
• Mobile publishing: This is somewhat of a corner case, but it is a big deal to Microsoft employees and other gadget geeks around the world.  Posting an image from the (phenomenal) Audiovox SMT5600 phone via email now works without having to have text in the body of the mail; just a photo will do.
• “Space not available”: Some of you may have been receiving “Space not available” errors if you setup a space during the first 24 hours the service was live.  This problem should now be fixed, and the likelihood of getting into this state on sign-up again is much, much lower.  The one gotcha is that if you had one of these spaces, you will have to go into Settings: Permissions and reset your space to Public (or whichever setting you like best.)  If you are still seeing this error, please send us Feedback using the link at the bottom of the page and we will look into it.
• Sign-in/out: We made some updates that will help improve that pesky sign-in/sign-out issue in places like the comments area.  If you don’t know what I am talking about, don’t worry about it.  It was harmless – but it was pretty darn annoying, so we fixed it.
• Usability:  It is now easier to get into “author” mode from “preview” mode on your own space.  Just click “Customize” in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, where “Preview my space” is usually shown.
• A bunch of other random fixes: Without going into too much detail, there were other little things we did to improve your experience with Spaces.

Now, before you ask why we didn’t add publishing APIs, 100 new themes, and <insert feature here> into this “release”, there is a pretty simple answer.  It has only been two weeks and features take time ;)  Our main objective during this beta period is to button up this product – to make it as predictable as possible with super-high quality.  With so many moving parts behind the scenes, this can sometimes be a challenge.  But this is what we are looking to do first and foremost before tackling any other new features and functionality.  Of course, that doesn’t mean we aren’t working on that too ;)

Side note: This process has already been incredibly fun and rewarding to all of us, even after just 14 days.  Thanks to tools like Feedster, Technorati, PubSub, Bloglines, and of course, our own MSN Spaces, we have been able to very quickly get a read on the ‘connected conversation’ out there when it comes to Spaces and our launch – and we have even jumped into the fray and commented on a lot of the feedback, either on our spaces or on your blogs and discussion forums.  The best part about this crazy new world we live in is that we have been able to get immediate feedback from real customers (i.e. not just focus groups) on what is great about Spaces and what can be improved in the future.  Coupled with the data we receive daily from our Support team, this is how we determine what takes priority for the team.  So I can’t underestimate how important it is that you continue letting us know your thoughts.  Thanks!

Some other comments on this:

Shel: "The part that interests me is that the MSN tech team used blogging comments to make its first round of improvements. In days of youre, back in say 2003, months would have gone by."

Scoble: "One, that they are shipping new stuff only 1.5 weeks after they shipped. Yeah, Joe, MSN sure does seem to be moving faster lately, huh?

Second, that blogs are having such a big impact on product development. It's real interesting, now that PubSub, Feedster, and Technorati are bring back waves of feedback from bloggers all over the world, it's very easy for a product planner to put the top feature requests into a spreadsheet, walk into a meeting and say "here's what we need to do next week" and get approval and walk out."