Continuing with our ongoing partnering strategy, Messenger Connect enables our 500 million users to easily share what they’re doing across the web with their friends in Messenger & Hotmail. It also makes it easy for our partners to embed the world’s largest instant messaging network right into their sites and apps.
Today, we are pleased to announce that Messenger Connect is out of beta and available worldwide. We’ve gotten a great response so far: leading sharing syndicators ShareThis, AddThis, Gigya, and AddToThis have already made the Windows Live sharing badge available on more than 1 million websites (check it out now on Bing).
Over 2500 developers gave us great feedback during the beta, helping us to refine and improve this release of Messenger Connect. Below is a quick summary, but for all the details check out this post from Angus on the Windows Live for Developers blog. Our focus with the release of Messenger Connect was to make it easier for partners to adopt, without compromising user privacy.
- Easier to check out –We made it faster and simpler for partners to try out Messenger Connect and determine if it would be useful for their sites. For example: you can try out the real time chat control without needing to write any code.
- Easier to adopt and integrate– Wereduced the effort needed for sites to implement Messenger Connect usefully and powerfully by providing new tools and sample code for ActivityStrea.ms template selectors and more.
We will continue to evolve Messenger Connect to provide a great experience for consumers and great value to partners. If you’d like to join the discussion about Messenger Connect, check out dev.live.com/forums.
- More complete, and consistent with our data portability and privacy principles – Many partner sites want to allow their users to send invitations and other email messages to their Messenger friends to help them discover and start using their sites. Historically, they could do this using the Contacts API. However, as previously announced, we no longer allow open access to that API, due to conflicts with our data portability and privacy principles. In its place, we’re now offering a brokered invitation API that gives users most of these same capabilities without revealing the email addresses of their contacts to the partner site.
Jeff Kunins
Group Program Manager, Windows Live
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