Nearly six years after launching its own blog publishing platform, Microsoft is effectively ending development of Windows Live Spaces and announcing a partnership to upgrade users of the service to WordPress.com.
The companies just made the announcement at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. "Automattic is a company filled with great people focused on blogging and how to continually make their blogging experiences better and better," says Dharmesh Mehta, director of Windows Live product management, in a blog post.
The following message appears for new users visiting Windows Live Spaces –
“If you are looking for Spaces, this is where it used to live. If you came here looking to start a blog, you should go to our blogging partner WordPress.com to get started. You can even connect your blog back to Windows Live Messenger to share your posts with your Messenger friends. Or just go to your home page.”
For existing customers, Windows Live and WordPress.com have worked together to build a simple way to move blog posts, comments, and integrated photos right over to WordPress.com and start taking advantage of all their new features
In addition, Microsoft says its Windows Live Writer tool will use WordPress.com as its default blogging service when the company releases its Windows Live Essentials 2011 software package this fall.
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