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Microsoft Outlook Gets Facebook Hookup, Adds Pokes in Your Email

by Terrence O'Brien on July 13, 2010 at 02:15 PM

Outlook Facebook Integration
In February, Microsoft announced that its Outlook Social Connect plug-in would be integrating the world's most popular social networks into the office standard e-mail client. When it launched in February, only LinkedIn was compatible with the tool, but today Microsoft has released its Facebook add-on, which will identify the people listed in your Outlook contacts, and compile their info from Facebook.

Now, when a Facebook account is found via an e-mail address, the program will automatically cull the user's photo, status updates, Wall posts and other information from their news feed. For now, though, it's a one-way street. Users cannot update their Facebook status from Outlook, send messages, "like" anything or comment on content. The only actual direct interaction with the service is the ability to send friend requests to new contacts. Microsoft is offering the plug-in for Outlook 2010, 2007 and 2003, shocking most of us who thought this would be a 2010-only offering.

Microsoft is betting heavily that real-time updates will become an important part of your inbox experience. Consolidating these various communication outlets (including LinkedIn and Live Messenger) is part of the strategy to keep Outlook relevant in an increasingly cloud-friendly computing environment. Microsoft will have to hope that its execution is better than Google's (which it already appears to be). Buzz was launched to much fanfare before becoming a PR nightmare and then fading from the public consciousness. Ultimately, the question will be: do enterprise customers really want their employees reading Facebook status updates when they're supposed to be responding to e-mail? Perhaps so, as social networking becomes more integral to daily business interaction. [From: Mashable and BBC]

Tags: email, facebook, microsoft, microsoft outlook, MicrosoftOffice, MicrosoftOutlook, outlook, OutlookSocialConnector, socialnetworking, top, web

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