Microsoft versus social networking

By Microsoft Subnet on Wed, 03/26/08 - 10:24am.

Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it will collaborate with a group of social networking sites to allow contacts stored in Windows Live to be easily ported between Windows Live and social networking sites. Specifically, the Windows Live Dev blog announced that Microsoft has released the Windows Live Contacts API, meaning any social networking site developer can use the API to create data portability with Windows Live. Microsoft is first working on data portability with Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, LinkedIn and Tagged, though the Windows Live Dev blog didn't mention when that capability with these sites will be up and running.

Microsoft has finally discovered that the Internet and sharing go hand in hand. Service providers that have come from the collaborative no-boundaries world of the Internet, like Google and Yahoo, have long since known that the easier you make it for people to use contact lists to find friends on social networks, the more chance everyone has for success.

But this is a more-or-less "so what?" announcement from Microsoft, given the other social networking news on Tuesday. Yahoo said it has joined the Google-driven OpenSocial group and despite the dance its board is doing with Microsoft's acquisition bid, Yahoo is taking OpenSocial one step further. Along with MySpace and Google, Yahoo is to be a founding member of the not-for-profit consortium OpenSocial Foundation. OpenSocial backed by Google and a few launch partners is a set of open social-networking APIs. It was seen as a countermove to Facebook's popularity with developers.

Microsoft is not part of OpenSocial. Instead it is backing data portability organization DataPortability.org

A fork in the standards between major, rival players? This is such an old, old game. Microsoft has a long way to go to understand the culture of cloud computing and given the players banked up on the other side - Google and Yahoo - it is not the powerhouse.

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