As more and more communication takes place online, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of everything we do through email and social networking sites. However, Microsoft is introducing a social connector that will help individuals save time and energy.
Outlook Social Connector: What You Need to Know
What is the key to organizing social networking? Microsoft believes it’s about bringing all online networking activities into your email inbox.
Outlook Social Connector aggregates all of your social networking pursuits and makes them accessible through one program – and more specifically, one interface.
A Wealth of Information in Your Personal Inbox
At the bottom of the Outlook screen, the People Pane displays information about a given contact. The pane presents you with all relevant information for a particular person without having to dig through several different social networking sites.
Outlook Social Connector displays the following information for each contact:
- Communication history (email and messages)
- Calendar events and meetings
- Attachments
- Activity feeds
- Images
All of the information above is listed in one feed for each individual contact. An icon is displayed to the left of each item to help users determine which connector is responsible for each piece of information in the feed.
Microsoft’s Partnerships
Currently, the beta for Outlook Social Connector only provides a tie with LinkedIn and MySpace. The Linked In connector brings together your professional networking and your professional communicating by providing you with relevant information on various colleagues. MySpace status updates will also appear in the feed.
Facebook will be added as social connector in the coming months.
The Benefits
The Outlook Social Connector is the perfect tool for busy business professionals who do not have time to sift through seas of social networking sites. Irrelevant information is filtered out, eliminating extraneous sacrifices of time and effort.
Outlook Social Connector will also save you time by syncing your contact information with changes on social networking sites. For example, if a colleague changes his or her phone number on LinkedIn, the number will automatically be changed in your Outlook account. If you have your mobile device synced to your Outlook account, the number will be changed there as well.
Outshining its Competitors
Although the final version has yet to be released, business writers at PCWorld.com believe Outlook Social Connector is already surpassing the capabilities of Google Buzz. Buzz works less as a social networking hub and more as an additional site to keep track of.
Previous attempts at a social networking interface have been made, including TweetDeck and AOL’s Lifestream. Unlike these interfaces, the Microsoft aggregator does not require an additional program to be installed and does a better job of filtering out social networking “noise.”
The Future of Outlook Social Connector
While some individuals feel that Microsoft cannot compete with the social networking advances of the day, the advent of Outlook Social Connector has already turned some heads.
“Fundamentally, we believe that to empower our users, the existing members of Linked In, we need to bring their professional network to where they’re working right now… Microsoft with Microsoft Outlook empowers the professional inbox, the tool you use everyday at work to communicate with your existing colleagues. So, the match is actually very clear,” Elliot Shmukler, Director of Product Management at Linked In, said.
In addition to Linked In, Facebook and MySpace, Microsoft plans to add additional social connectors, which will further develop the intricacies and organization of this already complex interface.
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