Over the last few weeks, we've spent a good bit of time talking about our approach to partnering with the web, and as part of that, how we're deeply integrating with the leading consumer services that you find most valuable. Earlier today, I had the opportunity to get on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, and with Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic (the parent company of WordPress.com), announce an exciting partnership between our companies.

Providing a great blogging experience

As we looked at customers' blogging needs and what different companies were providing, we were particularly  interested in what WordPress.com is doing. They have a host of impressive capabilities – from a scalable platform and leading spam protection, to great personalization and customization. WordPress powers over 8.5% of the web, is used on over 26 million sites, and WordPress.com is seen by over 250 million people every month. Not only that, Automattic is a company filled with great people focused on improving blogging experiences. So rather than having Windows Live invest in a competing blogging service, we decided the best thing we could do for our customers was to give them a great blogging solution through WordPress.com.

Windows Live and WordPress.com

As we looked at how we brought Windows Live and WordPress.com together, there were three big things we wanted to deliver:

  • Giving existing Windows Live Spaces customers an easy upgrade of their blogging experience to WordPress.com
  • Letting anyone connect their WordPress.com blog to Messenger so their Messenger friends are updated when they publish a new post on WordPress.com
  • Allowing Windows Live customers to easily create new blogs on WordPress.com

Upgrading a Windows Live Spaces blog to WordPress.com

There are 30 million people who are actively using Windows Live Spaces and have been eagerly awaiting the next set of new blogging features. For these customers, Windows Live and WordPress.com have worked together to build a simple way to move your blog posts, comments, and integrated photos right over to WordPress.com and start taking advantage of all their new features. And we'll also redirect all your old Spaces URLs to your new blog, so you don't lose any visitors along the way. If you want to get started today, just visit your existing Space and you'll see a prompt like this:

A simple migration experience

If you're not ready to migrate today, you can also choose to download your blog content, migrate later, or delete your Space. There's more information posted online to help you with your options, and if you have additional questions on the migration, please visit the WordPress.com support center.

Easily share with your Messenger friends

With Messenger Connect, any website can easily give their customers the ability to share updates with their Messenger friends, and WordPress.com has done exactly this.

Connect WordPress.com to Messenger

So, if you have a blog on WordPress.com, we know that one of the things that is likely important to you is the ability to share the blog with your friends. Of course, on WordPress.com, you can make the blog public and people can subscribe to the blog via RSS or you can just email a link to the site. But when you connect your Messenger account to Wordpress.com, you can have new posts on your WordPress.com blog automatically send a notification for each new blog post to your Messenger friends' feeds.

Windows Live customers getting started with a new blog

Starting today, when new Windows Live customers go to create a new blog on the web, we'll help them create that new blog on WordPress.com. And when Windows Live Essentials 2011 releases later this fall, Windows Live Writer will also use WordPress.com as its default blogging solution.

Create a new blog on WordPress.com

Windows Live and WordPress.com

We're very excited to work with WordPress.com to give our shared customers a great experience that connects the fantastic blogging capabilities on WordPress.com with the leading communications and sharing services on Windows Live. We hope you enjoy this too, and we look forward to partnering with even more great services from around the web.

 

Dharmesh Mehta
Director, Windows Live Product Management