Use the Outlook Social Connector with Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Windows Live!

Outlook is the premier communications tool to stay connected with colleagues, friends, and family. Your email messages, even from multiple accounts, are in one place. Connections and communication also happen on websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Windows Live. Through these sites, you find new contacts and reconnect with old ones. You can share who you are, what you think, what you are doing, and what you like or don’t like. So, it makes sense that you can now add your friends and colleagues to these sites and get their activities from within Outlook.

Today, we are announcing that you can use the Outlook Social Connector with Facebook and Windows Live. Our partners LinkedIn and MySpace are also releasing updates for their providers. All of the latest providers appear on the provider page.

We are also releasing the Outlook Social Connector for Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and Office Outlook 2003 in the following languages:

Arabic, Brazilian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Thai, with more languages in the upcoming months.

You can the download Outlook Social Connector for your language at the Microsoft Download Center.

Lastly, we are also releasing an update to the Outlook Social Connector for Outlook 2010. This update is distributed through Microsoft Update.

To learn more about the Outlook Social Connector, see this introductory article.

With today’s updates:

You can add friends and colleagues to Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Windows Live, directly from the Outlook People Pane.

When viewing a message from someone, you see real-time updates from his or her activities on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Windows Live. You see information that your friends and co-workers have made public on those sites, as long as the email address they are using to communicate with you has been added to their account settings on the social network.

We believe that the information you share through social networks is a matter of personal choice. You should decide whether to share very little, or reveal a lot about yourself. You might decide to share information only with your friends, or share details with everyone. You might decide to have a strong division between personal networks and professional ones, or between social networking and email. The Outlook Social Connector respects what you decide to share through social networks. Other people using the Outlook Social Connector can only see information about you based on what you have made public to them on social networks and the email address in your profile on the social network.

You can review our privacy policy here. You can also review those of our partners by visiting their sites to understand each option and help make your personal choices to protect your privacy.

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How is social networking and Outlook working for you? We look forward to your comments.

Randy Byrne, Program Manager, Microsoft Outlook

Alessio Roic, Program Manager, Microsoft Outlook

Paco Contreras Herrera, Group Product Manager, Microsoft Office