MSN has gone through 12 hours of parturition pains on the birth of its MSN Live Spaces services. According to MSN representatives, the issues that beset the social networking service in the wake of its launching have caused disappointment throughout the mass of its users. "There was a period of over 12 hours where Spaces at best were extremely slow to render, if they rendered properly at all. We had a bunch of people working hard and late last night to address these issues that did not show up in any of our test environments. We planned long and hard for this release and unfortunately it was one of those gotchas that only showed up once we were in production," explained Greg Phipps, Program Manager, Windows Live Spaces.

With MSN Live Spaces, Microsoft aims at upgrading MSN Spaces, an online initiative that proved to be highly successful for the Redmond Company, with social networking features. Live Spaces will fuel the growth of the 40 million MSN Spaces blogs and will drive up the current volume of 120 million unique visitors per month.

At present time, Greg Phipps has revealed that the management team is hard at work fixing inoperable stats pages, the incorrect way legacy emoticons are rendering, e-mail publishing, Firefox and Friends Explorer glitches.