Windows Live Spaces was known for limited blogging experience, but offered great connected ecosystem with other Windows Live services. Many Spaces customers asked for a richer blogging experience, and Microsoft has now partnered with WordPress.com to upgrade Windows Live Spaces!
Automattic is the company behind popular blog platform WordPress.com, an adaptation of the open source WordPress.org project. As of March 2010, over 23 million blogs have been created with WordPress, with thousands of new ones built each day. WordPress.com is a top 10 global site as measured by Quantcast.
The upgrade is fast and easy – all your blog’s posts, photos and comments will be seamlessly transferred and all your old links work so your readers won’t have to do a thing. By connecting your new WordPress.com blog to Windows Live using Messenger Connect, your friends will still see all your new posts in their Messenger Social feed throughout Windows Live. During the transfer, some spam would be taken off too.
Note that your draft posts, theme, gadgets, guestbook, and lists aren’t transferred.
If you do not want to opt for the upgrade, you can do this at the moment:
- Download the blog
- Keep it pending
- Delete your space
You have until March 2011 but you should upgrade to WordPress.com today!
For now, you can still make posts to your Spaces blog, and you can decide when to upgrade. You have until March 2010 to upgrade. Starting January 2011, if you haven’t upgraded yet, you will no longer be able to add content to your Spaces blog, but your existing content will still be visible. The same options to upgrade, download or delete your blog will still be available.
You can also see the Space to WordPress migration tutorial & screenshots here!
When Windows Live Essentials 2011 releases later this fall, Windows Live Writer will also use WordPress.com as its default blogging solution.
