Mike Torres of the MSN Spaces team was kind enough to respond to my post entitled, MSN Spaces, Meet XBOX 360. Mike asks, "What do you folks think about what Tony is saying here?"

Mike got a couple of thoughtful (and positive) responses on his blog... but like most of us, lacks the 'Scoble-sized readership' necessary to solicit a statistically significant response. :) Mike, FWIW, a few thoughtful people commented on my post via their own blogs, including:

• Nathan Weinberg of BlogNewsChannel, who writes, "Sounds like a plan. Of course, Halo 2 outputs your stats as XML, which you can easily plug into your blog (you can see it in Major Nelson’s sidebar). I think everybody would love it if Microsoft put some of Tony’s ideas to use (and it would make the 360 more popular)."; and
• Martin Visser of Visions of the Future, who writes, "This will be great! ... I also think that the combination of blogging, gaming, presence, IM and sharing photo's/video's will be a great feature!"

But (much) more importantly, Mike (finally [grin]) gave a clear answer on Microsoft's intentions around whether MSN Spaces would be part of a closed or open micro-content stack, stating:

"One thing I would like to correct though: we are not trying to be a walled garden of just MSN content. We had to make some hard cuts in our first couple of releases that "power-users" like me weren't thrilled about... But now we have an incredible infrastructure and deep domain knowledge, so the sky is the limit with where we take this platform. "

Mike, I'm sincerely thrilled to hear this (both that you guys are going to be more open in the future -- hopefully we'll hear the same from Yahoo! soon -- and that you're planning to bring more innovation to this space now that you've got your core infrastructure in place). Don't forget me when you're building out that beta list, eh? ;-)