This is a guest post by Ankit who blogs at GettingMoneyWise. Do check out Shoutmeloud Guest posting guidelines.
I am not sure if one should take this piece of information as the failure of Live Spaces or the growing dominance of WordPress platform but it is happening. Microsoft and WordPress.com announced that WordPress will become the default blogging platform for Windows Live.
Microsoft has its own Windows Live Spaces blogging platform for quite a while and apparently boasts of 30 Million users. With the new partnership announced, all Windows Live Spaces users will be able to port their blog posts, comments and photos of their blogs to WordPress.com platform.All the users are going to get a prompt to migrate their Live spaces blogs to WordPress.com platform. For those who do not wish to do so, they can download their blogs to their PCs and choose to delete the Live Spaces blog
One interesting feature of this partnership is the seamless integration that Windows Live Spaces provided will not be lost. Users will still be able to connect their wordpress blogs to Messenger connect and notify their friends of new posts.
Here are the official statements from Microsoft and WordPress.com
Microsoft
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
WordPress
We’re very happy that Microsoft chose WordPress.com as their preferred new blogging service for Windows Live users
There is no doubt that WordPress has indeed become the choice of blogging platform and is growing everyday. Currently, it boasts of running over 26 Mn sites. Further, if Windows Live Spaces has indeed 30 million users and good percentage of those users indeed make the switch to WordPress, the growth of WordPress would be meteoric.
Come to think of it, it is a prudent move on the part of Microsoft. When there is an advanced platform available why not use it out of the box and concentrate on improving the core product
Are you a Windows Live Space user? Would you be making the switch to Live Spaces?
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Well you can’t say this was unexpected either. Microsoft has been leading the M&A tide in the past couple of years in its bid to challenge Google’s online supremacy. Their tie-up with Wordpress would definitely draw attention to Microsoft’s brand (as though any more is needed
) and perhaps Wordpress.com would adopt Bing as its official search engine in the near future!
True that, Microsoft has been after anything Internet to keep itself in proximity with Google. However, in the past it has made a lot of investments in revamping its own solutions which IMO was not prudent. Partnership with Wordpress helps Microsoft use a popular platform and instead focus its efforts on other core products.
The possibility of Bing coming out as an official search engine is interesting and quite possible
The possibility of Bing coming out as an official search engine is interesting and quite possible
This just goes on to show the power of the wordpress blogging platform. Even the heavyweights are bowing before it. I believe, this is the magic of being open source and developers from all corners of the world contributing to make it truly world class.
I have a big question: Live Spaces provided free custom domain mapping service .. while wordpress charges exorbitantly for this service .. now this is a major loss for domain holders and they will turn to blogger. Also, Wordpress does not support html editing in any case. they charge you for this .. Again blogger would be a solution ..!
-hilly