Today
George Moore, GM of Windows Live, announced the Windows Live Contacts Gadget beta at the Microsoft TechEd 2006 conference, in
Auckland New Zealand (I’m here at the conference courtesy of Microsoft NZ). Live Contacts
provides programmatic access to a user’s contact list, providing secure access to 400+ M
active users with 12B contact records. The user is in full control over their personal
data, George said.
Here’s the
official word:
“Learn how, with nothing more than a little JavaScript, you can allow customers to use
their Windows Live Contacts (Hotmail/Windows Live Mail and Messenger contacts) directly
from your Web site.”
For more, check out the developer
info and two working samples. MS developer
Danny Thorpe
notes:
“The contacts gadget is client-side JavaScript that enables end users to use
their Windows Live contacts (from Windows Live Mail/Hotmail and Messenger)
with third party (non-Microsoft) web sites, conveniently and securely.
The gadget works with any web server, most browsers, and doesn’t require reams of license
or partnership paperwork with Microsoft. You don’t have to assimilate your web
server into the Microsoft collective in order to play with Windows Live contact
data.”
You can also show your contacts on a map using MS Virtual Earth, as per below:
Windows Live Stats
George Moore also told the conference attendees some stats of the current MS active
audience – 240M Hotmail users, 230M Messenger, 72M Spaces, 8M mobile subscribers. He
tells the mostly developer crowd at TechEd that “this is the audience that can be reached
by Windows Live services.” He goes on to say that at any one moment, 20M people are
simultaneously connected on Messenger and 5.7 Billion messages are sent per day. Also there are 300M F2F
video conversations on Messenger every month. George said Spaces is “now the largest blogging service on
the planet” (RM: so it’s bigger than blogger.com?) – it grew to 30M accounts in its first 6 months.
