PRESS: Windows Live seeks to make social networking easier

When I was in Australia I did a phone interview with Ashley Clark – below are a few snippets but head over to IT News to read the full article.

The bulk of the interview was about Data Portability and what’s cooking in the Windows Live Platform.

Microsoft is allowing its Windows Live customers to consolidate their contact lists across different web sites with the release of Windows Live Contacts API.

When featured on a website, Windows Live Contacts API allows the 400 million Windows Live customers to integrate their contacts, including their Hotmail, Messenger, and Mobile contacts, with the specific site.
“We thought ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could use [Window Messenger] on different websites?’” said Angus Logan, senior technical product manager for Microsoft

“When I sign into Facebook, for example, why do I need to manually re-enter all of my friends from Messenger or Hotmail?"

…

“My team’s mission in life is, instead of Microsoft just dealing with the consumer, we want other people to be able to do the dealing as well.”

“Lots and lots of websites were already taking this information. They were already saying, ‘Hey, why don’t you invite your friends from Gmail or Hotmail?’ But the way they were doing that was very dangerous,” he said.

“They were basically asking people for their user names and passwords, and then they were illegitimately accessing the services... they were either manually sucking the data off the screen, or accessing programmatic endpoints that they weren’t allowed to be accessing.”