14 DAY TRIAL // There have been some very interesting developments around Microsoft's decision to shut down Live Spaces and offer its users the option to move to a WordPress.com-hosted blog.
At the time, Microsoft claimed that it had 30 million active Live Spaces users, which seemed suspiciously high, considering that WordPress.com has just 12 million.
We noted that the figure seemed somewhat exaggerated and that Microsoft wasn't making it very clear what it meant by 30 million "active customers."
The use of the word "customers" is a clever bit of marketing. Of course, since the service is free, "customer" is a lot less accurate than user. However, the vagueness it confers made it harder to disprove any number Microsoft chose to stick next to it.
Turns out that what Microsoft meant by "active" is "dead," as internal emails show that just about 300,000 bloggers are expected to move to WordPress.com.
"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," a senior Microsoft exec is said to have emailed his colleagues.
On the face of it, this sounds bad enough, but there is some context that needs to be explained. Earlier, when deciding what to do about Live Spaces, some at Microsoft worried about the message the move would send since WordPress.com is running on open-source software as opposed to the Azure cloud platform Spaces currently uses.
Moving 30 million blogs, as Microsoft seemed to be insinuating initially, to the competition wouldn't be great for employee moral or potential customers.
So the Microsoft exec tried to calm people down by revealing that nowhere near that many people were actually moving and that WordPress.com was the best choice for the ones that were still using Spaces.
Microsoft has now tried to clarify the number saying that there are 30 million users of Live Spaces including visitors. Just seven million of those are authors. "Most" of the seven million actually have a blog, Microsoft says.
At no point is the company claiming that these are active users, so it can be assumed that less than seven million actually refers to the total number of blogs on Spaces.
Little by little, we're getting closer to the 300,000 active users figure. It may very well be that this figure was also exaggerated, but in the negative sense to calm people down.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has also clarified things a bit further. From the looks of it, the company had no idea on how many blogs were actually active, apart from what Microsoft told everyone.
Until now, Automattic says, 50,000 Live Spaces bloggers have migrated to WordPress.com in the first 48 hours. If Automattic provides an updated figure in the future, we should be able to get a pretty good estimate of how many people are actually using Spaces.