microsoft

Windows Live Spaces Migrating to WordPress.com

Big news – at TechCrunch Disrupt we announced today that Live Spaces will be migrating millions of blogs to WordPress.com, and that new blogs will be created automatically on WordPress.com.

In addition, we’ve added support for Messenger Connect as a Publicize option, which enables you to automatically share new posts on your WordPress.com blog with your buddies on Windows Live Messenger. This new Publicize option joins our built-in support for Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo!.

WP.com today has nearly 14M blogs, reaches over 260M uniques, and is growing at a nice clip. With the addition of all the MSN Spaces blogs it will add to the great community of bloggers and amazing content being produced each day on WP.com.

As Matt posted a few minutes ago:

I’ve been impressed with Microsoft’s regard for their users in providing a solid upgrade and migration path with a really smooth experience

Ditto — too many services today provide very weak or super manual tools for migrating over. Big props to Microsoft to working on making it as smooth as possible and easy for their users — really impressive. On our end, we make sure to preserve all the content with original post dates and the like — and we redirect all the old URLs over, so nothing gets lost or drops out of the search indexes.

For Spaces bloggers looking to make the move, check out the MSN announcement post, and our welcome post on WP.com.

Caligari Purchased by Microsoft — VRML Flashback

Saw on paidcontent that Caligari, the makers of TrueSpace, were acquired by Microsoft:

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) buys…this time a smaller deal. It has bought Caligari, a developer of 3D modeling software, with an eye to use its technology for its Virtual Earth mapping system. No financial details were released. In December, Microsoft bought UK-based Multimap for a reported $50 million.

Calgari, founded in 1986 and based in Mountain View, CA, started by making 3D software for the Amiga.

As someone who did a bit of work around Virtual Reality Modelling/Markup Language (VRML) — a nominee for worst pronounced acronym ever — back in the mid 90s, seeing Caligari in the news instantly brought back memories of WebFX, Paper Software, and the promise of more killer Netscape plugins. Here is a link to what was hot in VRML back in September 1996.