Evidently undeterred by Google's rocky integration of Gmail and
social networking, Microsoft on Wednesday strengthened Outlook's
connections to social networks.
Building on its Outlook Social Connector (OSC), introduced last
November as a way to make social networking contact information
available in Outlook, Microsoft announced the public beta of
LinkedIn for Outlook and partnerships with Facebook and
MySpace.
Microsoft Outlook product manager Dev Balasubramanian in a video
explains that the goal of these partnerships is to "bring social
networking into the inbox."
Last week, Google brought social networking into the inbox and
found itself twice forced to make changes to the service for
failing to anticipate the privacy problems that arise when a medium
used for confidential communication meets a service designed for
sharing.
Balasubramanian in a blog post notes that Microsoft's OSC
software is designed to respect social networking privacy settings
and that Microsoft's goal is to connect existing social networks
rather than build a new one (as Google is trying to do).
"What we think users will appreciate is that the Outlook Social
Connector doesn't add another professional or social network into
the mix," he said. "The Outlook Social Connector does offer busy
people, who are already a part of one or several networks,
convenience -- not confusion."
LinkedIn for Outlook, now available as a download, allows users
of Office 2010 Beta to see colleagues' LinkedIn status updates and
photos in e-mail messages, to allow LinkedIn contact information
changes to update Outlook contact data, to add LinkedIn connections
through Outlook, and to sync mobile phone contact information with
Web data.
When Facebook and MySpace connectors are made available later this
year, Outlook 2010 users will have access to similar functionality
with those sets of contacts.