Space swap
Microsoft's Windows Live has partnered with WordPress to offer a better blogging service, but its existing offering, Windows Live Spaces will be gradually phased out.
While Live Spaces has around 30m users, Microsoft was impressed with Wordpress' spam protection, scalable platform and features to customise blogs as well as its web presence as it is used on over 26m sites and seen by 250m people every month.
"So rather than having Windows Live invest in a competing blogging service, we decided the best thing we could do for our customers was to give them a great blogging solution through WordPress.com," Dharmesh Mehta director of Windows Live Product Management wrote in a blog post.
He has previously said Microsoft would focus on "letting consumers connect their experiences across the web to what they are doing in Windows Live, and vice versa."
Mehta added the Microsoft plans to work with Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube among others to bring their services to Windows Live users.
Microsoft has also stressed it is this integrated approach that interests it. Mehta said the aim in joining with WordPress was to give the existing 30m users of Live Spaces an easy blogging upgrade and merge it into its social web. Now anyone can connect their blog to Messenger so their friends are updates when they publish a new post on WordPress.com.
The two companies have worked together to create an easy way for existing Live Space bloggers to shift their posts, comments and pics over to WordPress and will redirect all old Spaces URLs to new blogs so bloggers do not lose followers.
Live Spaces bloggers will see the following prompt: "If you're not ready to migrate today, you can also choose to download your blog content, migrate later, or delete your Space."
Microsoft said the forthcoming Windows Live essentials 2011 which is due to launch this Autumn will also use WordPress as its default blogging offering.
