Confessions of a technophile

Microsoft yesterday announced that it will begin rolling out social networking features to Windows Live over the coming weeks to U.S. users and globally by 2009.

It's a significant - though somewhat belated - move from the software giant, given that its Windows Live products have been natural candidates for social networking. After all, there's always an element of social networking in applications like instant messaging, photos, events, calendaring, groups, file sharing and e-mail.

Prior to the announcement, I participated in a private beta for Microsoft's Windows Live Wave 3, essentially an updated suite of the company's Windows Movie Maker, Photo Gallery, Mail and Messenger products, plus new products including a blog editor called Windows Live Writer and Windows Family Safety for Internet filtering. These products are now branded as Windows Live Essentials and available here.

While the updated products displayed a marked improvement over their predecessors (I'll talk about a few of them in a later post), it's their integration with online services that's worth noting.

You can, for instance, upload your images from Windows Live Photo gallery directly to your Flickr account, or to Windows Live Photos. These photos can then be shared with your friends on the new Windows Live homepage, which has been completely spruced up.

The most notable difference for anyone new to the revamped homepage is the list of status updates from your Live Messenger contacts. Besides aggregating your content and activities on other Live services and sharing those with others, you can also add third-party sites to your Windows Live Profile and have activities on those sites appear in your "what's new" feed across your network of friends.

So far, the list of third-party sites include Twitter, WordPress and Yelp with more expected to be added on. Microsoft said it is collaborating with over 50 Web companies, including Flickr, LinkedIn, Pandora, Photobucket, among others. Reports have indicated that Facebook and Amazon are also in the list.

You can also include RSS feeds from just one blog on your profile, though it would have been much better if more blogs were supported. Most people track or author multiple blogs and it's silly not to allow users to include more blog feeds.

With all these, your new Windows Live homepage looks similar to current aggregators such as Netvibes and iGoogle, plus social networking features.

Early this week, Barrie Ooi, regional product manager at Microsoft's online services group in Southeast Asia, started his presentation and dialog with a group of regional bloggers by pointing out that users are now swamped with multiple social networks, and that the new Windows Live can now aggregate them all.

But, questions linger over the willingness of users to start adding pictures and engaging in conversations on their Windows Live network when they're already doing that for things hosted on some other Web 2.0 service or social network site.

While I can now include my list of favorite books in my Window Live profile, I'm not going to start putting out a list all over again when I've already done that on LibraryThing. More importantly, my network on LibraryThing is different from my Facebook and LinkedIn networks, which are different from my Windows Live network. The kinds of conversations I have with people on different social networks vary both in depth and interest.

That brings me to one important point about any social network. It has to create stickiness among users. If Microsoft wants Windows Live to be a social network made up of Hotmail and Messenger users, there needs to be something more compelling for users besides aggregating users' stuff from other services.

It's a good idea to build on the user base of Messenger and Hotmail, but people started using those services as IM and e-mail services respectively - and not in social networking terms even as elements of social networking are clearly present.

For now, I don't have more than a handful of friends on Messenger who've created Live Spaces profiles, the starting point of any social network site. The first thing Microsoft needs to work on is to convince users why they should do that.