A couple of notable developments this week on the mobile apps/services front: Microsoft made moves to connect its Outlook e-mail client more directly to Facebook friend lists; meanwhile, Facebook itself took steps to go even further down the mobile path. Both steps forward should immediately hit mobile operator radars — and hard.
Microsoft’s move could be huge — or, as with many efforts from the software giant these days (can you say Kin), land with a big “who cares” thud. Last year, Microsoft linked social network feeds (starting with Facebook) with Outlook, letting you see what your contacts were up to. This week, it’s started showing Facebook integration, a huge step forward, as more and more people dump their social lives into Facebook.
Here’s what Mashable had to say about the move:
The entire experience is a step above the Outlook-LinkedIn integration, which itself was pretty strong. Not only does it pull Facebook profile photos so that you can associate a name to a face, but it pulls the newsfeeds of your contacts into your inbox. When you’re looking at someone’s e-mail, you’ll also get a glance at their status updates, picture uploads and wall posts, among other activities.
When you combine that with LinkedIn, MySpace, Windows Live Messenger, and Outlook data, you get a very detailed history of your interaction with your contacts, as well as an at-a-glance look at their activities and interests. Knowing that a potential client just returned from a trip to Hawaii can be all that you need to have the upper hand against your competition.
While Microsoft’s move aims to keep Outlook at the center of the social graph, Facebook is moving strongly to put itself directly at the center, with a growing focus on mobile capabilities. The social network is looking to build a “platform play” for mobile, allowing all sorts of applications to access Facebook data to build mashup apps.
VentureBeat reports on plans from Erick Tseng, Facebook’s new head of mobile products:
Tseng pointed to location as one area where social features could strengthen user experience. “If you can actually layer on top of [location] some kind of social intelligence — not just the fact that I’m near Starbucks, but the fact that 30 of my friends really like this frappuccino over the last couple months — I’ve got an interesting use case,” he said.
“Mobile is fast-becoming our growth lever. As we begin to continue to expand, we’re starting to go into geographies where phones are the predominant way you access the web,” he said. “Mobile is a way we can get users to be aware of and engage with social services.”
Connected Planet’s take,
Rich Karpinski:
It is certainly not good news that the list of areas that mobile operators were supposed to own but don’t — including customer data, location, on-device applications and more — is growing so long. It looks like we’ll soon be adding networked address books to that list. A cloud-delivered address book such as Microsoft is moving toward — synched across devices and constantly kept up to date — would be a natural service for mobile operators to “own.” After all, they already touch so many parts of that equation. But it continues to look like software players, not telecom service providers, will have a natural leg up in creating mobile apps. It’s arguable, though, if Microsoft is in any better position than service providers.
That’s where Facebook comes in. If Microsoft with Outlook owned the “e-mail generation” (in particular, corporate e-mail), Facebook is clearly threatening to own at least some aspect of just about every digital social interaction today. Which makes their growing focus on mobile all the more threatening to mobile operators. The answer: partner with them as quickly as possible, just as operators — via Android but also directly — have benefited from teaming with Google. Almost all mobile devices today sport a Facebook app; it will be interesting to see which mobile operators leap first into offering deeper integration across Facebook data, apps and growing mobile APIs.
That’s our take on this. Let us know what you think in the comments section below:
Thanks for posting this- I work for M80 (a social media marketing firm hired by Microsoft) on the Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 advertising campaign. Just wanted to quickly mention that we are demonstrating several of the new Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 features on the Allure Bays Corp. microsite (http://www.allurebays.com). Check it out and feel free to send us comments on Twitter (@allurebays).