Windows Live Spaces Turns Three
My Opera web browser, normally the king of stability, crashed and completely screwed up my saved tabs, so I’m posting everything old right now, in order to set things right.
Wish a happy third birthday to Windows Live Spaces, celebrating three years in which it has become the biggest blogging service on the planet. Some stats from the blog:
- Over the past 3 years, we have grown the number of visitors to Spaces from 1 visitor when we launched the Beta version in August 2004 to over 115 million monthly users worldwide
- This month when one of you signed up for Spaces, you created the 100 millionth Windows Live space. This means that during the last 3 years, there have been over 100 million Windows Live spaces created for people to express themselves and share their thoughts, photos, and interests.
- With the latest release, Spaces is now available to people in 55 countries and in 33 different languages. It is amazing to see that over the last 3 years, there have been as many spaces created in Turkey as in Australia, Germany, or Taiwan. Looking back three years, Spaces was only available in 1 country.
My first impressions of Spaces, back in 2004, were that “Out of the box, users can do more with Spaces than Blogger”, “new users will be thrilled”, “Spaces is more than enough for 95% of bloggers, while the other 5% can use Blogger and Typepad”, “Spaces has a good chance at actually winning”, “Maybe Google had better create a smarter and more versatile interface for Blogger before it realizes Microsoft has stolen all of its users”.
I don’t always toot my own horn, but I was 100% on the money. Spaces has been tearing up the blogging marketplace, and it forced Google to renovate blogger after Microsoft stole all their users.
