Starting next week I will no longer be involved as a developer for the Windows Live Spaces product.  I will start to work instead on the next iteration of Windows Live Groups.

This is a bittersweet time for me.  Working on Spaces was my first job out of college, so it will always be somewhat special for that reason alone.  I’ve enjoyed learning to use Spaces myself and seeing how it can help me stay in touch with family and friends. 

Recently I’ve also enjoyed interacting with active members of the Spaces community.  I’ve gotten to know many active Spaces users through our team blog, the Spacecraft.  I’ve placed real effort into making sure that our customers are taken care of and get any assistance that they need while using Spaces.  I’m sad to see those days end.  I will probably still read comments on the Spacecraft, but I will no longer take an active role in ensuring that customers received answers to help requests.  It’s sad for me because I really enjoyed the help that I’ve been able to give over these past months.

At the same time this change, like all changes, is exciting.  Windows Live Groups is a new product in the latest release of Windows Live, and I’m really excited about it.  I’ve always believed that the Internet can make our lives more productive and fun.  Windows Live Groups is no exception – it provides groups of friends and family that want an easy way to stay in touch and coordinate combined activities.

I don’t plan to leave this blog entirely – I will probably still post interesting things from time to time as I find ways to use Windows Live Groups to better stay in touch with the people I care about.

My wife came to me with an interesting request – a family profile on Facebook.  Seems there are a lot of people that we know of Facebook that we don’t know individually but as a family.  A family-to-individual connection best describes our relationship with them rather than the individual-to-individual relationships that are more common.  A family profile would allow us to present the activities and thoughts of our family in a unified way to the outside world.  We have such a profile on Windows Live, and it’s been a great way for others to see the whole activity of our family at a glance.

I was excited by the idea.  I had never heard of such a concept before, but it made sense.  Working on a social networking product myself, I was intrigued to see how the proposal would play out.  I attempted to create a family account on Facebook, but I was thwarted at every turn as the signup system continually rejected the names that I chose.  “The Rutledges”, “The Rutledge Family”, '”Rutledge Family” – all of them didn’t meet Facebook’s bar for names.  I finally sent e-mail to Facebook support, and I was informed that families are not allowed to create profiles on Facebook – only individuals.  Here’s a snippet of the e-mail that I received:

> Facebook profiles are meant to represent a single individual. Groups, families, businesses and other types of organizations are not permitted to maintain an account. We apologize for the inconvenience.
>
> If you would like to use Facebook to represent your group, we offer a Groups application. Facebook Groups allow users with common interests to come together to express objectives, discuss issues, post photos, etc. If you have a personal Facebook account, you can create a group from the top of the Groups page.

Drat!  I don’t want to create a Facebook Group.  Groups seem to be meant for group members to communicate amongst themselves.  This is different - I want to be able to project our family image, activity, and interaction in a unified way to the outside world.  I gave up for a few days, but I finally got the process to work by choosing “Rutledge Fam” as the name.  Suboptimal, but I’ll try to see if I can change the last name back to “Family” after I get the confirmation mail and finish the signup process.

I’m looking forward to taking our real-life family identity to the web and seeing how it can help to us to connect and share with the people we care about.