Are you one of the 30 million+ Windows Live Spaces users? If so, then welcome to the WordPress community! The folks from WordPress.com made a huge, almost jaw-dropping announcement yesterday via their official blog that WordPress.com is now the default blogging platform for all Windows Live Spaces users. This comes as a result of Microsoft’s decision to shutdown Windows Live Spaces (formerly MSN Spaces) and migrate all 30 million+ users to WordPress.com.

Here’s an excerpt from the official announcement on the WP.com blog:

We’re excited to announce that WordPress.com is now the default blogging platform for Windows Live Spaces users. We’ve worked with our partners at Microsoft to create a simple migration service for Spaces bloggers to easily bring all their posts, comments, and photos to WordPress.com.

Over a six month period, beginning today, Windows Live Spaces users will have the option to move their blogs to WordPress.com. To make this possible, we’ve created a brand new importer for Windows Live Spaces to WordPress.com. New Windows Live users will also be offered a WordPress.com blog when they choose to create a new blog.

This is great news for Automattic, Open Source and GPL and of course this is also great news for the WordPress community! Not only does this increase the userbase but it also makes the community more diverse. It’s also good to see how Microsoft value and respect their users – providing their users the best alternative and making sure they have a smooth transition. I believe that the one who will benefit the most from this move are the users themselves. Why? Because with WordPress.com, they have a stable, feature-rich platform that has lots of resources and an awesome community.

If you’re a current Windows Live Spaces user who’s worried about losing search engine results page (SERP) rankings and/or losing traffic, don’t worry because WP.com has got you covered. All links on your Windows Live Spaces blog will be automatically redirected to your new WordPress.com blog after you’ve migrated and set it up. At the same time, the redirect will also notify search engines that your content’s home will now be on WordPress.com.

NOTE: For Windows Live Space users planning on migrating to WordPress.com, if you want an archive of your space, you need to grab a zipfile export from Windows Live Space before starting the migration process. One more thing, the migration process will preserve the post creation dates on Windows Live and will be carried over to the WordPress.com blog.

On a related note, it will be interesting to see what will happen to Windows Live Writer. Wonder if Microsoft will turn it over to the folks at Automattic? Do you think that will happen?

Again, from us here on JaypeeOnline, we would like to welcome all Windows Live Spaces users to the WordPress community!

Anyone here who’s a Windows Live Spaces user? Have you made the transition to WordPress.com? If not, which blogging platform/service did you move to and why? What do you think could be the positive and/or negative effects that this move have on WordPress.com? Please share your thoughts.

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Thanksgiving is a big event here in the US and we celebrated it last Thursday. As part of thanksgiving, I would like to thank the regular and loyal readers who continue to support this blog. I’m also thankful to God for restoring my health after being sick for more than a week. Hope you guys have a great week ahead!