live spaces are going to be murdered?????????????/

In a significant announcement that would affect bloggers who use Microsoft's Live Spaces blogging platform, Microsoft has confirmed that it will soon scrap Live Spaces and opt for WordPress, making it the default Windows Live blogging tool.

The move will affect over 30 million active users of Live Spaces. However, this could also mean better features and a more liberal platform for them to blog. That said, if you are someone who migrated from Wordpress to Live Spaces, then its sheer bad luck! For those who were put off by the lack of new features on Live Spaces, the adoption of Wordpress would surely come across as a pleasant surprise.

A senior Microsoft official has confirmed that users would be offered a very easy to use Migration tool that would allow users to move their blogs from Live Spaces to Wordpress. In fact, you can start the migration right now. The next time you login to Windows Live Spaces, you would be told about these options.

Microsoft has also confirmed that Wordpress would soon be the default option for Windows Live Writer. The sad part about this is that you won't be given an option to stick to Windows Live Spaces. You can either download your blog content and choose to migrate to another platform later or just wait for the service to end when your space would be deleted.

As for the reasons for scrapping Windows Live Spaces, a blog post on Microsoft's Windows Live Blog has clarified that they were impressed with what Wordpress was doing when it came to designing a robust, stable and scalable blogging platform. Hence, instead of competing with it Microsoft thought it was wiser to partner with Wordpress and save engineers at Microsoft the trouble of designing a platform to compete against an already successful service.