Windows Live Spaces, should we stop ignoring them?

When I talk about social networking the first sites that come out of my mouth are usually myspace, facebook, bebo, friendster, and tagworld. I ignore the offerings by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft on a regular basis, not out of spite or any other preconceived notions, I just see them as extensions for products they already offer.

I am going to make a concerted effort to cover these sites a little more because I clearly have under estimated them. Microsoft claims that they have over 93 million people using Windows Live Spaces, with other data sources like comScore saying that they get 112 million unique visitors per month. However, this large base is mostly international users, according to to various sources.

Recently Microsoft has rolled out new features to Live Spaces, which they talk about here in their development blog. Their development team has rolled out better communication features including a guestbook and messaging features.

Let me get a better grasp of what these three sites offer for the businessperson out there, I would like to hear from anyone that is currently using any of them to get their impressions.

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