Microsoft Makes Moving Friends Between Social Networks (Slightly) Easier

In my Techlog column in the May issue of our magazine--which subscribers will get in a week or so--I grouse that Facebook doesn't give me the ability to export my list of friends for use elsewhere. Damn you, print deadlines--there's news today that renders my gripe at least a tiny bit less relevant.

This post at Microsoft's Windows Live Developer blog explains it: Microsoft has struck an agreement with Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, Hi5, and Tagged to use the Windows Live Contacts API to shuttle contact information around. The results of the agreement are still a work in progress, but the blog post says that starting today, Facebook and Bebo will let you invite your Windows Live Messenger buddies to join those social networks. And Microsoft has set up a site to let you invite your social network pals to be your contacts on Windows Live Messenger, although every network except Facebook had a "coming soon" placeholder when I just checked.

(Here's a story on the news from our IDG News Service colleagues.)

Moving contacts between services isn't a new idea, but in the past, it's usually been doing through "scraping"--basically, giving a service your password to another service and thereby allowing it to log in as you and rummage around in your data. Microsoft says that this API approach is more secure, which makes sense.

Today's news hardly unleashes a nirvana in which you can effortlessly move your contacts between all the services in your life. Actually, if you don't use Windows Live Messenger, the news isn't very relevant at all, since it's all about enabling data exchange between that IM service and social networks. (Me, I'm mostly on AOL's AIM network, although the two IM clients I use most are Meebo and Apple's iChat.)

Microsoft is touting the Windows Live Contacts API as open, and presumably it's at least theoretically possible that Microsoft competitors such as AOL, Apple, and Google might jump on the bandwagon and support it, making it possible to zap contacts between all of the above social networks and Gmail and AIM and Apple's Mail and just about anyplace else that folks maintain address books. But such a scenario seems purely theoretical--it's tough to envision a world in which a Microsoft standard becomes universal if Microsoft competitors can prevent it from doing so. But if nothing else, it'll probably give Microsoft rivals an incentive to try and strike their own data-exchange deals.

And truth to tell, today's news isn't about real data portability--Microsoft very intentionally isn't enabling you to simply do mass dumps of your contacts between Windows Live Messenger and your social networks. Instead, what it allows you to do is ping your contacts, seeking ther permission to establish relationships in new venues. Selfishly, I kinda want to do bulk transfers without my contacts having to give their consent. But I can't squawk at Microsoft's decision to err on the side of giving both parties involved in a relationship the right to move it to other platforms.

So today's announcement doesn't render my column obsolete: I still want a simple, Facebook-approved way to export all my contacts and bring 'em into Gmail or Outlook or LinkedIn or any other tool I use to keep in touch. We still seem to be a long way from that being possible. But the Microsoft deal is a baby step in the right direction, and therefore an encouraging development..

Comments

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DennisA

April 06, 2008

9:37 PM PT

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