Summary: The vast majority of Windows Live Spaces is about to get wiped out, according to a source familiar with those matters

Windows Live Spaces became a notorious spam trap, as pointed out by blogs over the past year or so. Microsoft was a very poor steward, so the whole network got filled with splogs and other rubbish. Microsoft is playing loose with the numbers when it claims that 30 million users exist in Windows Live Spaces, which will be shifted to GNU/Linux in another company [1, 2, 3] so that Microsoft can shut down its own service. Based on this post with some statistics, only about 1% of Windows Live Spaces will actually be active, so it's natural to assume that 99% (or about 29.6 million of those 30 million users which Microsoft claims to have) won't even bother migrating to another service. Their blogs/splogs will die permanently within months.

Windows Live Spaces' shutdown may not be a big win for WordPress.com, after all. According to internal e-mail messages obtained by Betanews, Microsoft expects only about 1 percent of Windows Live Spaces bloggers to move to WordPress.com. If not there then where? In the e-mail exchange, one Microsoft executive asserts about the 30 million active Windows Live Spaces blogs: "Most are dead."

As MinceR put it earlier today, Microsoft is "where projects go to die". It's also where blogs come to die. One blog from Windows Live Spaces -- and one that we are particularly interested in -- belongs to the man behind Microsoft's highly unethical tactics. He wrote about them in Windows Live Spaces and we covered these back in 2008. Just in case he does not migrate his blog (it's not maintained anymore based on the amount of comment spam), we are going to keep a copy. To quote him: "To be profitable, the platform must not only dominate its market, but also be defended from cloning. Anti-cloning defenses include patents and rapid evolution. Maintaining the platform's anti-cloning defense must also be cheap, relative to the platform's revenue, else the cost of defense will consume the platform's potential profits." Well, somebody tell that to fans of Mono. ⬆