This was just announced at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.

Microsoft will be ending all development of Windows Live Spaces, the Microsoft blogging platform, and in a new partnership with WordPress parent Automattic will move all current Spaces users to WordPress.com.

According to the post at TechFlash the announcement, both at the TechCrunch conference and on his blog, Dharmesh Mehta – director of Windows Live product management – had this to say

“Automattic is a company filled with great people focused on blogging and how to continually make their blogging experiences better and better,” says Dharmesh Mehta, director of Windows Live product management, in a blog post. “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.”

On stage at TechCrunch Disrupt (via webcast), Mehta said there currently about 7 million Windows Live Spaces blogs.

Spaces users will have six months to move their blogs toWordPress.com using a specially developed migration tool that will shift their posts, photos and other media to WordPress blogs. The migration will also redirect existing Spaces URLs to new addresses on the free WordPress.com platform. The companies will offer a service called Messenger Connect for WordPress.com users to share posts with their Windows Live contacts, attempting to take the place of the existing integration between Spaces and other Windows Live services.

Needless to say this is a pretty huge development and we will be following up on it as we find out more.

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