Microsoft unleashed quite a bombshell last September when it announced that it would be shutting down its blogging platform, Windows Live Spaces, and making a migration to open source WordPress.com available to anyone wanting to continue their blogs. Since then, according to a blog post on Inside Windows Live by Dharmesh Mehta, over 500,000 Spaces users have migrated over.
In addition, another 500,000 have created new WordPress.com blogs using their Windows Live IDs according to Mehta, with certainly at least some of those pointed to WordPress.com by links to Spaces from live.com:
While the numbers seem impressive, estimates at the time of the announcement were that there were some 7 million active Spaces blogs, so either only about 7% of the supposed active blogs have moved, or the 7 million figure may have been optimistic. Still, given that WordPress.com had 13.9 million active blogs as of September (according to Joe Wilcox, anyway), another half million is a nice boost, and greater than the 300,000 predicted by a Microsoft Manager in an internal email as quoted by Wilcox.
Either way, it’s impressive that Windows Live ID users have started a half a million new blogs in just over 2 months, we’re all for blogging and are glad to see that the WordPress/Windows Live association is working out.
(By the way we’ve been pretty happy with our own move to WordPress here at LiveSide, as we continue to work on some url redirects from our old .aspx urls. We’ve also been playing with some WordPress plugins, and just recently converted all of our “Tweets” pages to use TweetBlender.)