Microsoft to shut down Live Spaces, Porting users to WordPress

Microsoft have announced that they;re to shut their underused blogging service, Windows Live Spaces, and instead port everyone's account to WordPress.  The announcement, made at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference and later reported by LiveSide, said that all 30 million active bloggers on Live Spaces would be migrated starting today.

The Spaces migration to WordPress.com will be automated and easy, ensuring the movement of blog content, integrated media, comments and links is simple. 8.5% of all web sites on the internet are now powered by WordPress, which represents over 26 million publishers who use WordPress to power their blogs and web sites. About half of those sites - 13 million - are hosted by us on WordPress where they attract one of the largest audiences on the internet: of over a quarter billion people every  month.

Windows Live Spaces will be formally closed next March and users who do not want to be moved to WordPress will be given the option to download their blog in HTML form or simply delete it.

Windows Live Spaces is, like I said, one of the least used blogging platforms primarily because of its simplicity and a lack of good customisation options.  As a compliment to the other Windows Live services it worked well, but was never as popular as it could or perhaps should have been given Microsoft's huge user base.

The move comes as Microsoft streamlines the Live services and introduce new ones to stand alongside the existing main applications and services such as messenger, which has been around in one for or another now for twenty years.