14 DAY TRIAL // The news came yesterday from Dharmesh Mehta, Director of Windows Live Product Management, at TechCrunch Disrupt, alongside Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic: Windows Live has teamed up with WordPress.com.
The 30 million people that use Windows Live Spaces will have to migrate their blogs to the WordPress.com blogging platform and they have six months to do so, before Spaces is shut down.
The passage should be as smooth as possible, officials say, and everything from blog posts to comments and integrated photos should get on to WordPress.com.
The old Spaces URLs will also be redirected to the new blogs, so that no visitor will get lost along the way.
If you want to start moving your blog today, you can do it by going to your existing Space.
Dharmesh Mehta explains that it was easier to find a very advanced, and already existent blogging solution – WordPress.com, rather than investing in a competing new blogging service.
WordPress is powering more than 8.5% of the web, is used on over 26 million sites, and WordPress.com is visited monthly by over 250 million people.
This new collaboration looks rather interesting for three reasons: the upgrade of your Windows Live Spaces blog to WordPress.com is simple, you can connect your WordPress.com blog to Messenger and allow your Messenger friends to receive updates with every new post on the new platform, and also, if you want, you can easily create new blogs on WordPress.com.
You also have the possibility of not moving today; in this case, you can download all your blog content, migrate later or even delete your Space.
Whatever you choose, you can find online information if you need any help and you can also go to the WordPress.com support center.
To share updates with all your friends on Messenger, you can use Messenger Connect, and have everyone know what your last post was about, thanks to the automatic notifications.
On WordPress.com, you can make your blog public and have people subscribe through RSS or you can just email a link to the site.
Also, for all new Windows Live customers that want to create a new blog on the web, they will be able to do it on WordPress.com, and after the Windows Live Essentials 2011 release, Windows Live Writer will have WordPress.com as its default blogging option.
It all sounds very nice, and the Windows Live team is rather enthusiast about this change, so as Dharmesh Mehta said in his post, “We hope you enjoy this too.”