According to Neowin, Microsoft will release the final version of Windows Live Essentials today. This comes about a month after an update to the beta on August 17th. Windows Live Essentials includes applications like Windows Live Movie Maker, Mail, Messenger, Writer, Sync, and Family Safety.
This final release offers deeper integration with Windows 7 using “jumplists” and all applications have the new ribbon UI. Windows Live Sync allows you to keep files synchronized across the web and multiple PCs. Windows Live Photo Gallery has received a few updates, including photo fusing and improved facial recognition.
Just yesterday, Microsoft and Automattic announced that WordPress.com would be taking over for Windows Live Spaces for blogging with Windows Live Essentials. It was reported that Live Spaces boasted 30 million active users and those users would be transitioned over to WordPress.com, who currently has about 14 million blogs. This would be huge for WordPress.com as they would triple their users.
However, According to internal documents acquired by betanews, it seems that 30 million number is incorrect. Many within Microsoft were concerned about moving so many blogs from a Microsoft platform to the competing Linux platform. In an effort to downplay the implications and avoid a decrease in morale with in the company, a senior Microsoft manager: “The net is: 300k sites are expected to migrate of the 30M ‘blogs’ — most are dead. WordPress is adding somewhere in the order of zero servers to handle this capacity. This was a ‘who has the best online service for blogging for our customers’ and had nothing to do with technology.”
Reaching out to both Automattic and Microsoft, Betanews learned that 50,000 users had already migrated to WordPress.com in the first 48 hours. On Microsoft’s end, they admitted that the 30 million number “includes both authors and their visitors.” The number of actual active authors is 7 million, which shaves 23 million off of their original figure.
While it’s normal for companies to overstate their numbers, this seems to be a pretty huge discrepancy and it’s doubtful that WordPress.com was aware of the “error.” In any case, WordPress.com should still see a significant bump in active users. Look for the new Windows Live Essentials around 1PM EST.