Welcome Windows Live Spaces Bloggers

WordPress to become the default blogging tool for Windows Live Writer..

In a significant announcement that would affect bloggers who use Microsoft’s Live Spaces blogging platform, Microsoft has confirmed that it will soon scrap Live Spaces and opt for WordPress, making it the default Windows Live blogging tool.

The move will affect over 30 million active users of Live Spaces. However, this could also mean better features and a more liberal platform for them to blog. That said, if you are someone who migrated from WordPress to Live Spaces, then its sheer bad luck! For those who were put off by the lack of new features on Live Spaces, the adoption of WordPress would surely come across as a pleasant surprise.

A senior Microsoft official has confirmed that users would be offered a very easy to use Migration tool that would allow users to move their blogs from Live Spaces to WordPress. In fact, you can start the migration right now. The next time you login to Windows Live Spaces, you would be told about these options.

Microsoft has also confirmed that WordPress would soon be the default option for Windows Live Writer. The sad part about this is that you won’t be given an option to stick to Windows Live Spaces. You can either download your blog content and choose to migrate to another platform later or just wait for the service to end when your space would be deleted.

As for the reasons for scrapping Windows Live Spaces, a blog post on Microsoft’s Windows Live Blog has clarified that they were impressed with what WordPress was doing when it came to designing a robust, stable and scalable blogging platform. Hence, instead of competing with it Microsoft thought it was wiser to partner with WordPress and save engineers at Microsoft the trouble of designing a platform to compete against an already successful service.

We’re excited to announce that WordPress.com is now the default blogging platform for Windows Live Spaces users. We’ve worked with our partners at Microsoft to create a simple migration service for Spaces bloggers to easily bring all their posts, comments, and photos to WordPress.com.

Over a six month period, beginning today, Windows Live Spaces users will have the option to move their blogs to WordPress.com. To make this possible, we’ve created a brand new importer for Windows Live Spaces to WordPress.com. New Windows Live users will also be offered a WordPress.com blog when they choose to create a new blog.

All current links to your Windows Live Spaces blog will automatically redirect to your new WordPress.com blog after you set it up. In addition, this redirect we’ve set up will maintain your current traffic levels from search engines, as it automatically notifies search engines that your content has a new home on WordPress.com (the technical background on the 301 redirect method we’re using, if you’re interested, is here).

As part of this project, we’ve added support for Messenger Connect as a Publicize option, which enables you to automatically share updates to your WordPress.com blog with your friends who use Windows Live Messenger.

For detailed information on how the migration will work, check out this post on the Windows Live blog.

We’re very happy that Microsoft chose WordPress.com as their preferred new blogging service for Windows Live users. It’s a sign of how strong WordPress.com has become, and credit for that goes to every one of you who’s been creating here.

Getting the most out of WordPress.com

For Windows Live Spaces bloggers who are new to WordPress.com, we wanted to share a few tips for getting up and running with your new WordPress.com blog.

Learn WordPress.com
Get started with WordPress.com with this fun 10-step guide to becoming a blogging hero. We cover everything from the basics like creating your first post, through advanced topics like working with social tools.

WordPress.tv
Check out “How To” videos on just about every feature of WordPress.com on the WordPress community video site.

Support
If you need a little more help, make sure to browse our extensive support knowledge base, and get in touch with the friendly WordPress.com support team, known around here as the Happiness Engineers. You can also get user-to-user help on our support forums. We’ve prepared a special FAQ for you that covers topics including Windows Live Photos and groups/friends support.