Windows Live To Add More Social Network Partners (Digg, MySpace, Facebook, Last.fm And More)
Microsoft's social networking strategy around Windows Live gets a little more meat on the bone today. In November they announced a new strategy that brings in activity streams, FriendFeed/Plaxo style, into a Windows Live home page.
Context & Ripple Effects
This extends the arc that began with Microsoft's 2005 Web 2.0 push (Microsoft Livens Up Web 2.0) and its 2007 repositioning of Windows Live around a renewed software-plus-services focus. The November announcement of FriendFeed- and Plaxo-style activity streams on the Windows Live home page was the framework; today's news is the supply side filling it in.
The partner list — Digg, MySpace, Facebook, Last.fm and more per Microsoft's own confirmation — turns Windows Live from a destination site into an aggregation layer over rival social networks, much as the earlier Live Events play targeted Evite rather than building events from scratch.
First-order effects
- Windows Live users get a single home-page stream pulling updates from Facebook, MySpace, Digg and Last.fm accounts they already hold, without visiting each network separately.
- Each named partner gains a distribution channel into Microsoft's large Windows Live user base — free reach, at the cost of their visits happening one step further from their own sites.
Second-order effects
- Rival consumer portals — Yahoo and AOL most directly — face pressure to match feed-aggregation features or concede that the default start page is being rebuilt around social activity rather than owned content.
- Social networks now have an incentive calculus over which aggregators get API access: being included drives discovery, but each integration weakens the network's own page-view economics.
Third-order effects
- If the aggregator model holds, the structural shift is from social networks competing on walled-garden traffic toward competing on where their data flows — making open APIs and feed syndication a standard expectation rather than a partnership perk.
- For Microsoft, the pattern continues the software-plus-services pivot: bundling third-party services into Windows-bundled clients keeps the desktop relevant even as the web layer belongs to other companies' brands.
The trend: Consumer web platforms are converging on activity-stream aggregation, with portals like Windows Live repositioning as syndication hubs layered over the social networks users actually belong to.