This morning there were a number of news stories about collaboration between Windows Live and Bebo. These news stories didn’t tell the whole story. Articles such as C|Net’s Bebo's new instant messaging is Microsoft-flavored and TechCrunch’s Windows Live Messaging Comes to Bebo give the impression that the announcement was about instant messaging. However there was much more to the announcement. The agreement between Windows Live and Bebo spans two areas; social network portability and interop between Web-based IM and Windows Live Messenger.
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Social Network Portability: As I’ve mentioned before a common practice among social networking sites is to ask users for their log-in credentials for their email accounts so that the social networking sites can screen scrape the HTML for the address book and import the user’s contact list into the social networking site. There are a number of problems with this approach, the main one being that the user is simply moving data from one silo to another without being able to get their contact list back from the social network and into their email client. There’s also the problem that this approach makes users more susceptible to phishing since it encourages them to enter their log-in credentials on random sites. Finally, the user isn’t in control of how much data is pulled from their address book by the social network or how often it is pulled.
The agreement between Windows Live and Bebo enables users to utilize a single contact list across both sites. Their friends in Bebo will be available as their contacts in Windows Live and vice versa. This integration will be facilitated by the Windows Live Contacts API which implements a user-centric access control model where the user grants applications permission to access and otherwise manipulate their contact list.
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Web-based IM and Windows Live Messenger interoperability: Users of Bebo that are also Windows Live Messenger users can opt in to getting notifications from Bebo as alerts in their desktop IM client. In addition, these users can add an “IM Me” button to their profile which allows people browsing their profile on the Web to initiate an IM conversation with them using a Microsoft-provided Web IM widget on the Bebo website which communicates with the Windows Live Messenger client on the profile owner’s desktop.
The above scenarios were demoed at this year's MIX '07 conference during the session Broaden Your Market with Windows Live. The current plan is for the APIs for interacting with the Windows Live Messenger service and the IM widgets that can be embedded within a non-Microsoft website that power this scenario to be available via http://dev.live.com in the near future.
At the end of the day, it is all about putting users in control. We don’t believe that a user’s social graph should be trapped in a roach motel of our creation. Instead users should be able to export their contact lists from our service on their own terms and should be able to grow their social graph within Windows Live without having to exclusively use our services.
It’s your data, not ours. If you want it, you can have it. Hopefully, the rest of the industry comes around to this sort of thinking sooner rather than later.
Stay tuned, there’s more to come.
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