Over 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:

• A unified contact list for all Windows Live users across all of our services
• A unified invitations experience for inviting people to your network on Windows Live
• A common look & feel for how you select contacts, view networks, and do other contact-based tasks

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 book

Windows 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 most

I 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:

• Messenger contacts – These are the people you invited to Messenger. You see when they’re online and can instantly start a chat with them. Your Messenger contacts are private—no one else can see that they’re your contacts.
• Profile contacts – These are the people you’ve selected to appear on your Windows Live Profile page (as shown below) to those whom you’ve given permission to see the page. Your Profile contacts are public—they let your friends discover other friends through you. Unlike Messenger contacts, these contacts can’t see when you’re online or instantly start chatting with you (unless you’ve also approved them as Messenger contacts).

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:

• Contact information updates—If a contact shares a mailing address with you and then moves, the new address will be saved in your address book automatically. This is something a lot of people tell us that they love because it means you always have the latest contact information. You also get birthday reminders for contacts in your network.
• “What’s new” information—These are updates that people in your network decide to share with you about what they’re doing online. They cover activities in Windows Live (for example, changing a picture, joining groups, or publishing a blog post) as well as activities on other websites (for example, updating on Twitter or publishing photos on Flickr). You’ve likely started to see “What’s new” information appear in Messenger, on home.live.com, and in many other places (soon including Hotmail when you sign in and when you send e-mail).

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 contacts

There 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:

• Organize contacts the way you want—you can create as many as you want and call them what you want. For example, I have the categories “High school friends,” “Family,” “Microsoft,” “Soccer club,” and “College.”
• Set permissions for things such as events, photo albums, profile details, and files to an entire category of people. For example, I have a lot of pictures that I share with only my “Family” – I can now do this by just selecting that category.
• Send an e-mail message to a category to send it to everyone in the category. This makes it a lot easier than remembering to include everybody when you send mail to large groups of people.

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)