Instead of reinventing the wheel, Microsoft has decided to go with WordPress.com for Windows Live Spaces customers. This means that current Live users will be able to migrate their blogs to WordPress.com and new users will get a WordPress blog. When checking out the competition, Microsoft decided that WordPress has “a host of impressive capabilities – from a scalable platform and leading spam protection, to great personalization and customization.”
The goal is to give Windows Live Spaces users the best blogging experience possible and finding a successful company to partner with instead of starting from scratch was the best option. It seems that the two companies are working hard to make sure the transition is a smooth one for current Live Spaces bloggers. They kept three key points in mind:
- Giving existing Windows Live Spaces customers an easy upgrade of their blogging experience to WordPress.com
- Letting anyone connect their WordPress.com blog to Messenger so their Messenger friends are updated when they publish a new post on WordPress.com
- Allowing Windows Live customers to easily create new blogs on WordPress.com
The 30 million people who have awaited the launch of the new blogging features on Windows Live Spaces should breathe easy. Migrating has been broken down to a few easy steps. Your content, comments , and links will all be moved over and preserved. All links will be properly redirected so that your visitors don’t get lost and you don’t lose your Google juice.
If you don’t want to move to WordPress.com for one reason or another, you can opt to download all your content, migrate later, or just delete your Space. Given these options, I’d recommend downloading your content and completing the migration process as soon as possible.
As part of making the migration as simple as possible, WordPress has created a detailed How-To which walks you through the process. In their welcome post to Windows Live Spaces bloggers, they’ve covered some basic WordPress resources for users new to the platform.
Definitely a big move by Microsoft, but it’s not as surprising these days to see them partnering with other successful companies. This is especially true in the social space. It also seems that this move is no surprised to many Windows Live Spaces users.
Are you one of the 30 million who used Live Spaces? Will you be upgrading to WordPress?