Live Spaces Shuttered

Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft’s blogging and personal home-page service, will be shut down in 2011, and the company is providing tools to help existing Spaces customers move their content to WordPress.com. Once the most popular blogging service on the Web, Spaces has languished with few updates over the last several years as Microsoft’s online priorities shifted.

Shifting Priorities

MSN Spaces was launched in spring 2005 to capitalize on the growing blogging trend and to give Microsoft an answer to Google’s 2003 acquisition of Blogger. Microsoft initially promoted Spaces with links in its popular Messenger program, and by spring 2006 the service had more than 100 million monthly visitors, according to ComScore.

Later, Microsoft tried to reposition Spaces as a social-networking hub akin to Facebook, but this transition failed to attract new users, and as Microsoft’s consumer online priorities shifted to search and its two popular communications services, Hotmail and Messenger, the company deemphasized Spaces and stopped updating it. In 2008, it launched Windows Live Photos and Profile for photo-sharing and social networking, replacing two previous functions of Spaces, and in the summer 2010 redesign of Windows Live, Spaces no longer appeared as a top-level menu item.