Outlook Social Connector Links to Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Windows Live

Outlook has grown beyond a simple desktop email client, and is now allowing customers to connect directly to four of the world’s top social networks. With the Outlook Social Connector users can tap into Facebook, Windows Live, LinkedIn and MySpace and make sure that they receive updates from their favorite social hubs. On July 13th, Microsoft announced the release of the Outlook Social Connector, effectively transforming Outlook into a super- communications tool that not only deals with email messages, but also centralizes social updates from colleagues, friends, and family and from multiple accounts in a single 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,” revealed Paco Contreras Herrera, Group Product Manager, Microsoft Office.

Office 2010 customers already have the Outlook Social Connector, by default. In this regard, Microsoft has packaged the Outlook Social Connector as feature of Outlook 2010, and is simply updating the tool. Users running Office 2010 will be offered an update to the Outlook Social Connector for Outlook 2010 via Microsoft Update, including Windows Update.

In addition, the Outlook Social Connector is now available for download for customers with Office Outlook 2007 and Office Outlook 2003. According to Microsoft, only the following languages are supported for the time being: Arabic, Brazilian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Thai. But the software giant did promise to add support for more localized versions of Office in the next few months.

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

Outlook Social Connector is available for download here.