Microsoft plans to offer 20 new web activities to add to your Windows Live profile within the next week. Currently only 12 of the "activities", which integrate your activity on other websites into the What's New feed on your Windows Live profile page, are available from third-party services such as Flickr, Twitter and StumbleUpon.As announced by Steve Ballmer in his CES 2009 keynote, Facebook is one of the new feed partners and once you have the integration set up between your Windows Live and Facebook accounts you should see content that you post on Facebook (photos, statuses, etc) imported automatically to your What's New feed, which appears on your Windows Live profile, on your contacts' Windows Live Home page, and in selected places in their Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail services.
In a posting at the official Windows Live Wire blog, Rob Dolin gives examples of some of the other new services that can be integrated. Websites such as Digg, Last.fm and SmugMug are included in the list of web activities that will be available in the coming days, with services like Amazon and MySpace slated to appear in the second half of 2009.
You can view the full list of new parters, both those that should go live next week and those set for a later availability, in this .doc document from microsoft.com and once the new web activities are up you should be able to add them to your Windows Live profile at http://profile.live.com/WebActivities/.
The other new parters that were revealed today are services that you can import your contacts from, allowing you to add people from social networks that you use to your Windows Live contacts. Currently this service is available with Facebook and LinkedIn but from next week you will also be able to import your MySpace, Hi5, and Tagged friends, with Bebo integration also coming soon. For most of these services the process should be two-way, meaning that you can also share your Windows Live contacts with these sites. To get started just visit http://profile.live.com/Connect/ once the new integration goes live.
[Image source: Windows Live Wire blog]
Exactly. I use Facebook and not Twitter... never saw a point for the latter.
200 million people.
That said, it only says "Such-and-such has updated Twitter." in the activity stream so perhaps the generic RSS would do better and actually say what they wrote.
Edit: Just to add that I mean the activity thing at the bottom of Windows Live Messenger etc, not the Windows Live "home" page.
Definitely going to be my homepage now. I feel like you have to switch to Hotmail to get the full benefit out of Windows Live Home, but until they get conversation view I'll pass on that.
Sort of.
In Windows Live, you now have a thing called a 'What's New' feed, similar to how the Facebook 'News Feed' works. The 'What's New' feed appears on many services and software (Home, Hotmail, Messenger, etc) - this form of the feed shows updates from contacts on your Windows Live People.
You also have a personal 'What's New' feed which shows you and other people news from you only - this is located on your Windows Live Profile.
What these new web activities will do is publish certain stories to your Windows Live 'What's New' feed, also showing these stories to other people in the 'What's New' feed on the other Windows Live services and software.
As far as I am aware, with Faceboook, it will only be status updates, photos you have uploaded and links you have shared which will be synced to the Windows Live 'What's New' feed.
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