Microsoft Pulls Facebook and MySpace into Outlook

Posted Feb 18th 2010 4:00PM by Brian White
Filed under: Products and Services, Microsoft (MSFT)

Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) has been decent recently about integrating tools outside its own realm into its newer products. Take, for example, Outlook. The most widely-used corporate email client has lost ground in recent years to web-based email alternatives that allow email usage without a locally-installed application.

From looking at the newer Outlook 2010 (which has not been released yet), Microsoft is trying something new: making Outlook a central communication hugs that not only handles corporate email, but integrates such social networking services as MySpace, Twitter and Facebook.

This is a good move. In fact, it's hard not to find a company these days (large and small) that don't pressure you to "Be our Friend on Facebook" or "Follow us on Twitter." Corporations are managing social networking more than ever, and in many cases there is no central hub for controlling all these tools. Outlook is for email, TweetDeck is for Twitter, Facebook.com is for Facebook and so on. Wouldn't it be nice to combine the most-used corporate email client with the most popular social tools?

This isn't innovative of Microsoft, really. It's a matter of survival. Promoting your own proprietary tools and dismissing the competition is a recipe for disaster. Microsoft's "Social Connector" plugin for the newer Outlook would be expected in the year 2010, to be honest. If the company is serious about keeping companies and their users hooked on Outlook, a full two-way integration with some of the world's most popular social communication tools -- outside of email -- will become a complete must. Nobody is using MSN Messenger anymore, right?

Tags: MicrosoftFacebook, MSFT, MySpace, myspace.com, Outlook 2010, Outlook2010