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Back in 2006, we covered the launch of Windows Live Spaces, a blogging service for Windows Live users. Today the service is headed in a new direction: Microsoft has teamed with Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, to transition its users over to the popular hosted blogging platform. The news was just announced at TechCrunch Disrupt by Dharmesh Mehta, Director of Product Management for Windows Live and Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic.
Microsoft says that it decided that instead of building its own competing blogging service, it should go with WordPress’s fleshed-out feature set, which has 26 million users and powers over 8.5% of sites across the web. Users will be migrated through a process that preserves all of their content, and will automatically redirect visitors who head to their existing Microsoft Live Spaces sites.
Users will have a few choices when they hit the transition page: in addition to transferring their content to WordPress, they can also opt to download and store it locally, delete it entirely, or put off their decision for a while). But Microsoft is going to be killing off the existing Spaces product in six months, so they users won’t be able to put off the decision indefinitely. When Live users go to establish a new blog, they’ll be directed to a WordPress signup screen.
Schneider says that this isn’t a financial deal.
Another feature launching as part of the partnership is the ability to connect WordPress.com blogs to Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger. The feature is pretty straightforward: publish a new post on your WordPress blog, and Messenger will send notifications to your friends’ feeds.
...runs, which, uh, runs wordpress.com. Correct? That Tony Schneider, CEO of Automattic, and Dharmesh Mehta who is the director of product management for Windows Live. It's great.
Okay, so what's, what you guys gonna announce today? Yup, so let me go in to a couple of things. So I'm gonna start out and then Tony will jump in, but so I'm Dharmesh Mehta, director of product management for Windows Live. And on behalf of the entire Windows Live team, I'm really excited to be here today in front of all of you. I'm talking about a great partnership that we think would be very valuable for consumers. So this partnership, I like to think back to the last job I had before Microsoft. I was actually the CEO of a startup out in Boston. And so being able to make this announcement here with all of you, it's particularly meaningful to me. Now when I was the CEO of a startup, we used to spend a bunch of time thinking about what is it we want to deliver and in doing that, how do we balance how we can take advantage of a lot of great offerings and services from our partners versus what do we need to build ourselves. And in Windows Live, we actually take the same approach. So, before we get to the news I want to spend a few minutes just talking about how we develop products. So, it all really starts first with the customer and who is the customer, what are their needs? Where there are gaps in the market place and how are these needs are changing, today and into the future? And with that mindset of these customers and what's going on with them , deciding what we wanna deliver in terms of scenarios. And within that, where do we build ourselves and how do we partner with other great companies to make that happen? And for us, this is really a three recipe, three-ingredient recipe. The first ingredient is, what are we gonna build ourselves? And there, it's the intersection of where do we see gaps in the marketplace? Where are there holes things aren't providing. and then what are our strengths? What are the unique things we could bring to bear? As we combine those, how do we create unique value propositions? Things where we have a point of view, something we want to deliver that we think's valuable to consumers but we don't see other people providing.
The second ingredient is that there are thousands and thousands of great amazing companies, like all of yourselves that are out there and we think it's important for people to be able to connect their experience in Windows Live with what all of you are building. And the only way that's gonna happen is what powerful Web standards. So we spend a lot of time helping drive the creation as well as the adoption of these standards. And so this is just a sampling of some of the amazing companies we get to work with, because of those standards. The third thing, though is if you look at what consumers are spending huge amount of time on line whether those are things from Windows Live, things like Hotmail and Messenger and SkyDrive, or amazing services from other companies, things like the top social networks, like Facebook and Myspace, or professional networks like LinkedIn, or the hugest place to share videos, like YouTube. Because of the massive amount of time people are spending on these sites, we think it's important that we more deeply integrate with them to give you a really great experience.
It's what lets us do things like take Messenger, and make it the ultimate people app that helps you bring together these updates from Facebook and Myspace and LinkedIn, and give you one place to connect with your friends and chat with them and comment. So it lets us give you that ultimate address book. That again you have got one view of your friends and all the different ways to interact with them. Taking an app like Photo Gallery, and we make it just as seamless to be able to share photos up on SkyDrive as we wanna take them and push them out to Facebook or Flickr or You Tube or other great sites.
Taking something like Hotmail. And those millions of YouTube URL's that we're all passing around, recognizing those inline, turning them into an inline video player. Giving you a great experience so you'll engage with Youtube even more. And so with that, I'd like to turn it over to Tony Schneider to talk about yet another great partnership and how we're connecting these leading online services. to Tony Schneider to talk about yet another great partnership and how we're connecting these leading online services. Thank you Dharmesh. I'm excited to be here today to talk about wordpress.com and Windows Live. Wordpress has been on a run. Eight and a half percent of all the websites on the Internet are powered by Wordpress these days. It's an amazing number. That's 26 million people using Wordpress to create websites and blogs, one of them our very own TechCrunch.com. About half of those sites, about 13 million, we host on Wordpress.com where people attract an audience of over a quarter billion monthly readers. Now let's talk about what we're announcing today. Automattic and Microsoft have entered a partnership to make wordpress.com, the default blogging platform for Windows Live. Starting today when a Windows Live user creates a blog, that blog will be powered by wordpress.com.
That blogger will also be able to connect their blog will be powered by wordpress.com.
That blogger will also be able to connect their blog back into Windows Live using Messenger Connect. That way, anytime they publish something new to their blog, automatically gets sent back into Windows Live, to their friends on their Messenger friend connect list. We've also been working with Microsoft to create a migration service to take the tens of millions of Windows Live Spaces users and move them over to wordpress.com. Spaces bloggers are able to pack up their blog, move it over to our system and then keep blogging using Wordpress on wordpress.com. We've worked really hard to make that transition as smooth as possible. The migration tool is available as of today, but the migration window will be several months long, so people will have a lot of time to move over. We're proud that Microsoft has picked us as their blogging partner, and we're gonna work really hard to create an excellent blogging experience for Windows Live users for years to come. Thanks. As I would just reiterate what Tony said and it's been great to see our two companies work ing together, taking a partnership approach and really focusing on how do we do deliver that best customer experience as well as upgrading those 30 millions Spaces customers into wordpress.com.
So, there are 30 million people on Windows Spaces, that are using Windows Spaces as their blogging platform, and you're transitioning them over to wordpress.com?
Yes. And Will, how long will you continue to support what Windows Spaces as a blogging platform? So Windows Live Spaces, we really think of this any time we have a product and we wanna upgrade that product. When we have a new version. You wanna have some kind of period of migration so people can take their content, decide if they wanna upgrade. The same thing you do with operating systems or products like office or any other product. And what we've chosen is the best blogging experience we can get customers is wordpress.com. And so we are gonna give spaces customers about 6 months during which they can take their content and choose to upgrade and move to to wordpress.com. It will be a great upgrade, and we're proud.
How many wordpress.com blogs are there now? I just wanna get a sense of the magnitude of. There's 13 million blogs and about a quarter billion people visiting those blogs.
13 million blogs? So you're, you're gonna almost triple the number of blogs that wordpress.com hosts?
Now just look at the data. 30 million Spaces customers, I would compare to that 260 million people. So there's 30 million people visiting spaces. There's about 7 million blogs. I got you. Okay. That's huge. So, what made you decide to outsource your blogging platform?
I don't think of it as outsourcing so much as it's just partnering, right? Which is saying hey there are things where we have a unique point of view, and we need to build this. I mean to continue to innovate, and look for ways to express something, the customers aren't getting anywhere else. When you look at blogging, we actually have a similar point of view and wordpress.com is actually doing an amazing job growing, continuing to invest in it. They have got a bunch of talented people squarely focused on that problem. And we just said, the best way to give our customers a great blogging experience is to give them wordpress.com. And is this a licensing deal? Microsoft is paying you a license fee? No. This is actually not a financial deal. It's really something where we sat down and said what's best for the users? So, how can we make sure that Live Spaces users can continue to blog and have a great blogging experience, and once they move over to us, they become Wordpress customers. It's really the connection point is through Messenger connect. And I think this is a cool example of how in a world of web services you can do these kinds of things where somebody can transition the userbase and still retain a connection with them, and so it's really not, these customers are really now gonna be using both of our systems.
Right, and now is Messenger Connect gonna become a feature of those blogs, and are you gonna integrate messages to connect into other Wordpress blogs? Yeah so, starting today on any wordpress.com blog, people will be able to connect. into Windows Live. So not just Windows Live users, but any Wordpress blogger can use that connection.
Does that mean, can you use that as a sign in or what does that mean? We call it a publicize option, so we actually have a number of them. So anytime you publishe a post it can automatically go out and we might do more in the future. Terrific. Well, thank you very much for sharing the news with us.
Great. Thank you, Eric. Thanks. Thank you, Eric. Okay. Alright, so, up next, Todd Bradley...
Continuing live coverage can be found at our day one omnibus post. Don’t forget to tag your disrupt-related posts and media with #tcdisrupt!
Automattic is the software and services company behind popular blog platform WordPress.com, an adaptation of the open source WordPress.org project. The company was founded by Matt Mullenweg who continues to be the primary developer and spokesman for the company. Former OddPost CEO and Yahoo VP Toni Schneider is CEO.
In addition to WordPress.com, Automattic runs several additional Web services, including Akismet, Polldaddy, IntenseDebate, Gravatar, VideoPress, After the Deadline, and WordPress VIP Hosting. Gravatar was Automattic’s first acquisition, followed by...
Microsoft, founded in 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is a veteran software company, best known for its Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software.
Starting in 1980 Microsoft formed a partnership with IBM allowing Microsoft to sell its software package with the computers IBM manufactured.
Microsoft is widely used by professionals worldwide and largely dominates the American corporate market.
Additionally, the company has ventured into hardware with consumer products such as the Zune and...
WordPress.com offers a popular and free blogging platform which competes with Google’s Blogger and Six Apart’s TypePad.
WordPress.com is a version of the open-source WordPress package hosted and maintained by Automattic.
TechCrunch, Giga Omni Media and other prominent technology blog networks use WordPress.com’s VIP program.
