microsoft & facebook - not quite what I would call data portability

So you can now add your facebook friends to your windows live (or MSN) messenger account. (You can also add your msn messenger friends to facebook). I gave it a quick test and sure enough it pulled all my contacts out of Facebook and offered me the option of adding htem to my messenger account.

One problem.

It did not differentiate between those that already have a Messenger account; those that I am already connected to and everyone else.

Basically I have to spam all my friends asking them to sign up for Live Messenger, surely Microsoft can check who has a valid account or not? I am ignoring the fact my friends could be using Yahoo Messenger (whom I can also connect to using Live Messenger) - as I assume Yahoo will not let Microsoft check for a valid account.

Another major issue, is that it also only pulls in my main email address from Facebook - not my Live messenger account which I have filled out in my profile so anyone using this would connect to me using the wrong account anyway.

Oh dear.

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There has been a bunch of rumours that Plaxo will get bought by Google or Facebook. But I think Microsoft would be a much better fit? Plaxo has great integration with Microsoft Outlook - which fits well with Microsoft’s connected applications strategy, it has a large base of registered users and could add to Microsoft’s online portfolio. It would also allow for Outlook to become more “socially” aware and take advantage of the email social network. Of course Yahoo has a social network so maybe this is only a go-er if the Yahoo deal falls through.

I do not see any positives though for Facebook buying it or for that matter Google really. What am I missing?

If you haven’t heard about Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope you should go check it out here. It looks very cool and will change the way kids interact with astronomy.

Reading Dylan Fuller’s post on AOL CEO, Andy Fulco, talking tough:

“I hope they beat each other’s brains out over search and leave the display market to us,” he said to the Interactive Advertising Bureau annual conference. “I think it’s a mistake. But I think Napoleon said never interrupt your enemy when they’re in the middle of making a mistake.”

Dylan is right there are some cool products being talked about. But this is how to lose users.. go along to the Xdrive website and click the link for more info about their new ultra cool Xdrive Desktop Lite app - a 404 error.

So I download it instead.

I already have an account.. I can log in via the website just fine - but I just get a login error via the Xdrive Lite app. I know it is in beta still but surely they can do better than this?

AOL are lucky Google’s Gdrive is not out yet and Microsoft’s version (Skydrive) is currently unusable - you have to select individual files to upload to their online storage - thats great when I have a few thousand files.

[update] ah - they fixed the link now and updated the front page design entirely - much better, there is also no advert either on the front page interestingly. For me though, the product still just doesn’t seem to work as advertised. I selected a directory and dragged it to the app. It should sync right? Well the list of transfers shows all the files but after it syncs some files, it just seems to get stuck - files are no longer being uploaded. I don’t know why.. some form of error message of status bar would be useful! Incidentally this was the same issue 4 months ago when I last tried Xdrive

I noticed something interesting the other day - Microsoft released the new Vista service pack early to everybody when they only intended to release it to a small group for testing.

What’s interesting is that Microsoft released the service pack to manufacturing (RTM) back on 4th Feb, yet this seemed to happen on 21st Feb. This means that even post RTM, Microsoft is working on (and making changes to?) SP1 - I didn’t think changes were made to RTM - looks like I was wrong.