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1/26/2009 Managing your contacts with Windows Live PeopleOver the course of the past year, Windows Live has made some large investments in simplifying and advancing what you can do with your contact list. Before I start, let me set the stage a bit. I’m Omar Shahine, and I’m the lead program manager for the new Windows Live People. When I joined our team almost 5 years ago, we had two large address books – one for Hotmail and one for Messenger. We found that many of you used both of these products and were asking for us to make this easier by giving you one contact list to manage. So we formed a team to build a single store for all of these contacts, and this is what we internally call the Address Book Clearing House (ABCH). When the ABCH made its debut several years ago, it let you access all your contacts from Hotmail and Messenger. Today, it also lets you manage your contacts using Windows Mobile, Microsoft Office Outlook (via the Outlook Connector), Windows Live Mail, and more. This service stores billions of contact records for our users and its Contacts APIs have become an integral part of how other companies like Facebook and LinkedIn integrate Windows Live contacts into their websites. But in recent times, we’ve added several new services and some of them were not using the ABCH service. So some of the people you cared about did not appear in your main address book. And because you now had multiple lists of contacts, you also had to manage multiple sets of invitations. During the past year, we set out to build a few new things:
Before I continue, I want to be clear that we are not done with our releases and so some of these improvements are still coming – particularly the latest updates to Windows Live Hotmail and Windows Live People. Here is a picture of the People page, which is rolling out shortly and and should be available to all customers within the next few weeks.
Windows Live People: your full address bookWindows Live People will now contain all your contacts. You can use it to manage the standard details like addresses and phone numbers. You can also use Windows Live People to do a number of other things such as clean up your address book of duplicate contacts, import contacts from a number of programs and services, and print or export your contacts. If you haven’t tried the clean up feature, you should. You might be surprised at how many duplicate contacts you’ve collected over the years and how easy we’ve made it to fix that. Your network: keeping in touch with the people you care about mostI want to highlight two types of contacts that are particularly important –your “Messenger contacts” and your “Profile contacts.” Here’s a quick explanation of each type:
This picture shows how your Messenger contacts and your Profile contacts make up your network: These two types of contacts are important because you can receive regular updates from them:
We think that lots of users will want to put contacts into the middle “Messenger & Profile” bucket in the last picture. If you want to “upgrade” your existing Messenger contacts to add them to your profile, you can do it from this page: http://profile.live.com/connect/upgrade.aspx?ru=windowslive. Categorizing your contactsThere are a lot of other things you can do with your contacts. One that I really like is adding categories. Adding a category lets you:
We also created a special category called Favorites that appears across Windows Live. You can mark someone as a favorite by clicking the star icon in the contact list or moving the contact to that category. In Messenger, your Favorites appear at the top of your contact list so they’re easier to find. In Hotmail and the other Windows Live web services, you will see a tab for Favorites when you select a contact. As I said earlier, some of the things that I’ve mentioned here are just starting to roll out and it will be a number of weeks before everyone worldwide will see them all. Thanks for your patience while we continue to roll out the new services! - Omar Shahine (Lead Program Manager, Windows Live People)
Technorati Tags: Windows+Live,People page,contacts,contact list,address book,Messenger,profile,What's new
Windows Live Tags: Windows+Live, People page, contacts, contact list, address book, Messenger, profile, What's new, clubhouse, story Comments (135)
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