MSN Spaces: First Impressions
MSN Spaces is now available. This is Microsoft's new blogging service.
You never get a second chance to make a first impression. And my first impression so far: It's slow.
One fact of launching a web application is that if you expect to have, say, an average of 1000 concurrent users, on launch day, you'll have far far more than that. You may have enough resources planned for the expected usage, and it's hard to justify having enough resources available to handle the peak usage you might get just for a day or two..
Gmail's slow rollout is probably the best example I've seen of how to introduce something in a slow, controlled manner. I think everyone that wants a gmail account probably has an invite already (if you want one, send me an email) but it happened over a long time.
As for real first impressions of MSN Spaces, it's hard to say because at the moment it's very slow, and occasionally broken.