Windows Live Spaces

» see spaces.live.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

msn messenger was the chat client in turkey from about '02 to '10. that part is well known. msn spaces was the blog you got attached to your messenger identity, with a little icon next to your contact name in the buddy list when you updated it. honestly, half the value of the product was that update notification. you would see a friend's name pulse in your messenger window, click the icon, and end up reading their three-paragraph post about a song they had on repeat that week.

microsoft launched it as msn spaces in early december '04. the framing was always pragmatic rather than visionary: blogger had been google-owned for almost two years by then, myspace was about to become the social network of '05, and microsoft needed a blog product that connected to the msn user base. spaces was that product. you got a free space at spaces.msn.com/yourname, a customizable theme, photo gallery modules, a guestbook, and rss feeds out of the box.

i remember spaces from the '05 to '08 window, mostly through other people. the friends who used it most were the ones who had been on msn messenger longest, which in my circle was high-school classmates who had moved to different cities for university. a space was the lightweight way to share what you were doing without having to learn how to install wordpress on a paid hosting account, which was the path the more technical people in my circle were taking around the same time.

the rebrand to windows live spaces in august '06 was part of the bigger windows live umbrella push, where microsoft tried to consolidate its msn-branded consumer services under a new name. the brand change did not bring much new product, and the audience reaction was mostly indifference because the url stayed familiar (spaces.live.com instead of spaces.msn.com) and the features stayed the same. for some reason microsoft kept rebranding consumer products in those years, which probably hurt the products more than it helped.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

the peak was '07. about 30 million users globally, 27 million unique visitors a month per microsoft's own numbers that august. the international footprint was the real story, spaces was bigger in china and brazil and parts of southeast asia than in the english-speaking internet, because msn messenger had a stronger position in those markets relative to aim or yahoo messenger. that international tail is the reason the migration to wordpress was eventually structured as a global event rather than a regional shutdown.

the editor was light by 2026 standards but reasonable for '07. you could embed photos from your windows live folder or drop in a music player module, with custom-list widgets for favorite books or movies on the side. the customization options for layout and colors were generous to the point of letting people build pages that loaded slowly and looked like myspace, which was the affordance most users actually wanted at the time.

~ the fall ~

by '09 facebook had eaten enough of the casual social-update use case that the typical reason to log into a space had collapsed. nobody needed a separate blog to post a photo with a caption when the news feed did that with less friction. wordpress had hardened on the longer-form side, the writers who actually wrote were leaving spaces for self-hosted blogs or for wordpress.com directly. tumblr was about to absorb the short-form personal-publishing audience entirely. microsoft was looking at a product whose audience had three better options.

the september 27, '10 announcement was the surrender. microsoft signed a deal with automattic, the company behind wordpress.com, to migrate every active space over with a one-click tool. anyway, the framing was generous on microsoft's side: rather than just turn the lights off, they had arranged a soft landing on a platform that was actually better for what spaces users had been doing.

~ the actual end ~

the migration ran from september '10 through march '11. by march 16, '11 the original spaces urls redirected to either a wordpress.com page or a static notice. about seven million spaces were migrated successfully per microsoft's exit numbers, which means a large fraction of the 30-million headline peak had already been abandoned by '10 and never made the jump. the rest is in archive.org if you know the url pattern.

the wordpress.com partnership was unusual for microsoft at the time, since it amounted to handing the entire user base to a competitor in exchange for a less embarrassing shutdown. it was honestly the most graceful exit microsoft ever ran on a consumer service, even though the product itself never got mentioned again in any keynote.

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