Microsoft continues to innovate on multiple fronts to stay on the bleeding edge of productivity and social media. This is primarily through their push into the cloud using Windows Live and their Outlook Social Connector plugin, which connects your regular email with your social networking services. Social Connector initially only supported LinkedIn, but is now also integrated with Facebook as well as Windows Live Messenger. Windows Live now adds the ability to access your contacts across all Microsoft services at one location: http://contacts.live.com.
Microsoft worked side-by-side with Facebook to make sure Social Connector integration was on point. It works mostly as expected, pulling in profile photos and making it easier to see who you’re emailing, but it also pulls in Facebook news feeds from your contacts. While you’re checking your email, you can also see their status updates, picture uploads, wall posts, and other activities.
Keep in mind that you already have information about your contacts from LinkedIn, Live Messenger, MySpace, and Outlook itself. This gives you a broader context for what’s going on with your contacts and will allow you to make sure your interactions are relevant and useful. One additional point is that the social connector platform has been updated to allow for real-time updates. This means that you don’t need to manually refresh anything or worry about whether the information you’re looking at is up-to-date. It all happens for you in the background.
In the latest release of Windows Live, they’ve paid special attention to contact management. In a post on the Windows Team Blog, they talk about how confusing it can be and aim to offer a solution to the problem. They are offering a contacts setup that is similar to what Google already offers:
Up to date
Reflective of all the people you know on all the services you use
Available on all the devices you use (phone, PC, web)
Microsoft wants to take things a step further, though. Rather than simply aggregating all of your contacts, combining the same people from different networks, and keeping everything in sync, Windows Live will eventually let you do things like instant message your Facebook contacts.
The new Windows Live contacts interface will also integrate with your mobile device so that you can have your contacts on the go. The new contacts roll out is working along with the new Hotmail release, so if you don’t see it yet, be patient.