A mate of mine followed a crumbtrail to my test of MSN Spaces, checked out the photo gallery from the Microsoft event I went to, identified one of the people I couldn't, and sent me a link so I could update the description. Here's the link:

http://spaces.msn.com/garthk/PersonalSpace.aspx?_c11
_PhotoAlbum_spaHandler=TWljcm9zb2Z0LlNwYWNlcy5XZWIuU
GFydHMuUGhvdG9BbGJ1bS5Eb3dubGV2ZWxGdWxsTW9kZUhhbmRsZ
XI%24&_c11_PhotoAlbum_spaFolderID=cns!771726B765B31F
5C!104&_c11_PhotoAlbum_spaNumPhotos=11&_c11_PhotoAlb
um_spaPreviousImageID=cns!771726B765B31F5C!105&_c11_
PhotoAlbum_spaPreviousImageIndex=0&_c11_PhotoAlbum_s
paMoveForward=1&_c11_PhotoAlbum_spaPlayState=0&_c=Ph
otoAlbum

I wish I was making this up: it's more than 400 characters long, and it doesn't even work. When I follow the link, I get:

This space is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.

This error message turns out to be completely bogus, as I can still get to the photo gallery from the front door. A more accurate description of the problem would be:

You tried to follow a link with enough embedded session information to uniquely identify each and every sub-atomic particle in the universe a few hundred billion times over. Unfortunately, our developers couldn't quite squeeze into those 424 characters enough information to figure out which photo gallery your friend was looking at when he clicked on "Slideshow > Full View" and pasted the URL into his email message.

By comparison: Flickr can take me right to a given photo in 42 characters, a set of photos in 46 characters, or a photo in its set context in 57 characters:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbs/75860833/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbs/sets/1626983/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dbs/75860833/in/set-1626983/

Compare this to a permalink for a Spaces blog posting:

http://spaces.msn.com/garthk/blog/cns!771726B765B31F
5C!155.entry?_c11_blogpart_blogpart=blogview&_c=
blogpart#permalink

I'm finding it hard to excuse this. Surely, someone clever enough to get all this impressive AJAX stuff working would be clever enough to give me an item permalink I could read over the phone if I needed to? One short enough to paste into an email message without it line-wrapping?