[This entry is the fourth in my series covering Windows Live products and services]

Windows Live Spaces helps you to stay in touch with the people you care about

In this busy world, you need all of the time you can get.  Time quickly fills up just taking care of day-to-day needs, not to mention trying to find time for longer-term needs and goals.  With so much on the plate, it's difficult to put forth the effort to maintain meaningful relationships with people that you don't see often.  Unfortunately, this category of people often includes family members - parents, children, siblings, cousins, etc. - living around the country and the world.

Such things ought not to be!  Some relationships are worth maintaining even though you don't see each other often.  Windows Live can help you to stay in touch with the people you care about.  For me, the Windows Live Spaces web site is a key ingredient that helps me to stay in touch with extended family members throughout the country.

Windows Live Spaces is a free service by Microsoft that allows you to publish content on the Internet where the people you care about can see it.  You start by visiting http://spaces.live.com/.  After signing up, you'll see your "space", or a virtual canvas where you can place and arrange blocks of content.  You can add or remove these content blocks by clicking "Add modules" from the "Customize" menu near the upper-right.  Your space has a unique URL, or web address, that your friends can type into a web browser in order to see what content you've placed.

Two of the most useful modules are "Blog" and "Photos".

Blogs on Windows Live Spaces

Adding the Blog module to your space gives you a place to type blog entries.  A blog entry is any text that you want - usually a short story or your thoughts on some subject.  In fact, you're reading one of my blog entries right now!  Blogging online is an easy and fun way for you to record your thoughts and experiences in a way so that the people you care about can see it and stay in touch with you.  I've spoken a bit more about blogging in (where else?) a previous blog entry.

Photos on Windows Live Spaces

The "Photos" module gives you a place on your space to show photos.  Adding photos to your spaces is a snap with Windows Live Photo Gallery.  Photo Gallery is a desktop program that allows you to add photos to your space with a single click.  No firing up a web browser, no selecting photos one by one, just a click and Photo Gallery will put them on your space where your friends can see them.  I talk a bit more about Windows Live Photo Gallery in a previous blog entry.

Windows Live Alerts help people to stay in touch with your space

After you set up your space with a blog and photos, you should give the URL, or web address, of your space to the people you care about.  Now everyone has a single place to which they can go to keep up with you!  You just need to share stories and pictures once, and everyone can see them.

Over time, it can be difficult for people to remember to check your space for new content.  It is better for them to just receive a notification when you place new content on your space.  Windows Live offers such notifications through the Windows Live Alerts service.  With Windows Live Alerts, people can sign up to receive an automatic e-mail notification every time you post a new blog entry or photo to your space.  I've written a detailed blog entry on how to sign up for Windows Live Alerts for a particular space.  I have used the service personally, and it's been an astoundingly easy way for relatives to use their existing habit of e-mail to stay in touch with what are family is doing as we share it on our space.

Use Windows Live Spaces to stay in touch

In such busy times, Windows Live Spaces is a wonderful tool to help us all stay in touch.  You share about your life once, and then everyone that you care about can see it.  Sign up for Windows Live Spaces, publish blog entries and photos, and let your family and friends keep up with your updates through Windows Live Alerts.

[This entry is the third in my series covering Windows Live products and services]

Windows Live Photo Gallery is the program that you should use to manage your photos on a Windows PC.  You can download it from http://get.live.com/WL/config_all.  Once you install it on your PC, it automatically finds and organizes all of the pictures on your computer.  No more clicking though folder hierarchies in order to browse the pictures on your computer!  It organizes the photos by the date they were taken.  Just a click of a button brings all of the photos taken on that date into view.  I've found it to be a fast and easy way to navigate through years of pictures that I've accumulated.

But what good are pictures if they stay on your computer?  Photos are meant to be shared, and Windows Live Photo Gallery makes it easy and fun with one-click sharing.  With a picture (or group of pictures) selected, click on the "Publish" menu and you'll see an option to publish the photo(s) to Windows Live Spaces or Flickr.  With a single click you can share your pictures online where people you care about can see and share them.

Use Windows Live Photo Gallery to manage photos on your computer and publish them to places where the people you care about can see them.

I've been waiting for this time for a long while - Windows Live Wave 3 is public!  An announcement on the official Windows Live blog kicked off the disclosure, and there have been plenty of reviews all over the Internet..  What all of this means for me is that I can finally start talking about what I've been working on for the past year.

I am way excited about Windows Live.  Quite simply, Windows Live is a set of desktop programs and web sites that make it easy to connect and share with the people you care about.  I love Windows Live, and I'm doing my best on to blog about how Windows Live helps me in my life.

This upcoming release of Windows Live is particularly exciting for me because it will be the first time that my contributions will ship to the public.  Specifically, I worked on the Windows Live Profile page, which shows everything about you - your friends, your interests, and what you've been up to online.  You're in control of who can see what parts of your profile, of course.

For now, here's a screenshot of the new Windows Live Profile.  I'll give more details as to what I actually worked on when the site goes live.

I've spent the past several months delving into the world of Facebook.  It's been enjoyable on the whole.  A lot of people I know are on Facebook, and Facebook makes it easy to me to find people I know and stay in touch with them.  I even feel that I get to know some acquaintances better as they post their sincere thoughts and ideas on Facebook.

After a while, though, I'm wary of the fact that Facebook can make it too easy to stay in touch with too many people.  Many of my Facebook friends are people with whom I once had a friendly relationship, but now we've gone our separate ways in life.  College acquaintances, for example.  Old missionary buddies from my service in Bolivia.  Facebook allows me to stay in touch with their day-to-day doings, but the reality is that I will probably never see them again.  Of course it's nice not fall out of touch with friends, but we should be wary of continuing these relationships past the point when they would have normally terminated.  Facebook makes it easy to do just that by providing me with an artificial feeling of connectedness to people that by all other accounts are far away from me.

I won't tell anyone who they should keep in touch with on Facebook, but I will say that everyone should have a point where they question if it is really worth it to spend the time to stay in touch with this person.  For the first time, Facebook makes it easy to stay in touch with large numbers of people, but just because we can doesn't mean that we should.  The danger lies in artificially continuing these old relationships at the expense of current relationships or preventing us from forming new relationships.  In my busy life, I would like to have more time with my family.  I'd like to keep in better touch with parents, grandparents, and extended family members.  I'd like to get to know better people in my neighborhood and my church.  Then why am I spending time staying in touch with people that I'll never see again in my life when all of these other opportunities await me?

I'm leaving my friends list intact on Facebook, but I'm turning down the volume on people that I don't have a real-life relationship anymore.  By "turn down the volume", I mean that I'm telling Facebook that I don't want to hear about them as often (see picture).

They're still in my friends list in case I do want to contact them someday, but I'm not going to take my day-to-day time to keep up with them.  I'll use Facebook as a way to enhance my connection with my real-life relationships, not as a way to keep in close touch with relationships past.

Why does well-formed XML require named closing tags?  Since the opening tag has a name and it always lines up with the matching closing tag, then the closing tag shouldn’t require a name.

Instead of this:

<tag>

I’d like to put this:

<tag>

It’s kind of similar to the way that the .NET XML classes work.  When you write the start element you give it the element name, but when you write the end element, the XML writer already knows the correct name, so you don’t need to specify it again.  If only correct XML syntax didn’t require named closing tags!