back to article Microsoft's Outlook gorges on Web2.0 junk food

Web 2.0 sufferers can now plug their Facebook and Windows Live accounts directly into Microsoft’s Outlook Social Connector tentacle, which the software giant first announced in November last year. “You can view your social network as you look through your e-mail to stay connected with your friends, family and colleagues,” said …

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  1. Wibble

    Sounds like...

    CC:mail and MSMail connectors from donkey's years ago. Maybe also like the public folders vs. newsgroup connnectors...

    Given that Facebook is similar to email, it makes sense to use an email client to access it.

    But for whom? Corporates? SMEs? Maybe of some limited use in the corporate.

    Lot of effort to go to though.

    1. Daniel 1

      Well aye...

      It is an "Office Productivity Suite", after all - and closely integrating an Office Productivity Suite with Facebook doesn't give the lie to that argument, at all.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    End of the line

    Over the last few days there have been a lot of articles about Microsoft. Is it just me looking at these, and thinking the analogy of a drowing person clutching for straws?

    Is this perhaps the end of computers and IT as we know it. Are Microsoft going .... going ... like so many of the previous bastions of computing. Aside from the articles on here I have had a look at some other web sites, Byzantine Empire style bureaucracy, staff morale rock bottom. More management wonks, PowerPoint programmers, MS project managers, and Solitaire analysts than programmers..... is it too much to hope for.... are these the death throes of the evil empire?

    Oh well I can dream, maybe the web sites are biased. Still it is a lovely dream.

    Pip pip

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @Titus

      Did you see that Bill Clinton is speaking today at their annual worldwide partner conference in DC? Not sure if he had anything to do with it, but it's their biggest turnout ever for the annual event.

      I think all of this is their gasping for breath as they slowly descend into oblivion weighted down by their own mediocrity and arrogance.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    clear a path please

    a bandwagon is rolling through...

  4. TheBloke
    Thumb Down

    Utterly useless

    I tried the Facebook one. Unless I'm missing something huge, it's completely useless. You can';t just browse your Facebook updates or receive Facebook IMs. All that happens is that the "People Pane" (which in 2010 shows recent emails etc from the given person) will also show recent status updates from that person.

    A couple of problems.. firstly the vast majority of people I have on Facebook do not email me, or vice versa. We communicate on.. well, Facebook itself! Secondly, those that do do not use the same email address on Facebook as they do to email me. E.g. company colleagues email me with their company address, but have registered on Facebook with their personal or other address.

    So despite having it installed and configured, I have yet to get a single status update visible in Outlook.

    Just pants.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    WTF is MS thinking?!

    Outhouse urmm...Outlook is only part of the business line of Office, not the Home suite as it's a none home use application. As such, it doesn't need social anything tat! If anything it needs a way to block them so the gophers can get some work done instead of piddling around in Farmville.

  6. Paul 135
    Big Brother

    disappointed

    I tried the new Facebook connector for Outlook 2010, and had high-hopes for them after using the excellent Linked-in connector.

    However, the Facebook connector will not let you use all your Facebook contacts in Outlook like you can with LinkedIn - I blame this not on Microsoft, but on Facebook being evil and wanting to lock you into the Facebook walled-garden. Can I please have an evil Zuckerberg icon El Reg?

  7. David F
    FAIL

    Comedy

    We've been using OSC with LinkedIn at work for the last few days. It had a comedy habit of downloading random people's profile photos and associating them with the wrong person. One of the ugly guys at work comes up as the fittest bird you've ever seen. Everyone else (10% ish) whose picture comes up wrong tends to be a fat, bald old bloke.

  8. Jess

    Be nice when ...

    ... Thunderbird gets the same.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    to ask a silly question...

    Why?

    How hard is it to keep a browser tab open?

    Isn't the point of FB to communicate with people who you don't want to give your email address to?

    That seems to imply that they aren't *that* important to you. Of course, if you have their email address, you could just email them....

    Or maybe, MS have entered into some "co-marketing" deal with FB and its just a bit of free publicity.

    1. Daniel 1
      Joke

      No, no...

      The point of Facebook, is to yield up one tiny, seemingly insignificant, piece of information to some crappy website, that seems reasonably interesting, one afternoon, and then spend the next few years watching, as this website shares this tiny, nondescript crumb of information with anyone else who might hold data on you, until eventually they have built up an entire profile of you (and splurged it across the Web, because you couldn't update your privacy settings, faster than they could update their privacy policies).

      This is the new Web 2.0 business paradigm: why try and sell your customers anything, when you can just steal their identify?

  10. lucmars

    Ok, but...

    doesn't one start there an other kind of XSS attack or something like that?

  11. Steve Foster
    FAIL

    Oh goody!

    Yet more lame crap to uninstall from folks machines when I am asked to look at why they're so slow/out of disk space/have so many prompts for updates/etc...

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