Microsoft today opened up a little on the results of its strategy for
Windows Live Messenger Wave 4. We had the chance to talk to Dharmesh Mehta, Windows Live Director of Product Management, who explained to us that his team has realized the social networking market is not one that Microsoft should enter and just throw money at. Instead, he says, Windows Live is taking the low-cost and easier approach of partnering with the existing leaders of the social Web (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter were all mentioned by name).
Messenger is easily the most popular Windows Live application with
330 million active users. Dharmesh explained that while the application started out as a closed IM network, its future is in helping users share all the types of content they already consume—audio, video, status updates, and text messages. Currently, this content overload is resulting in "people missing lots of stuff." He revealed that since the beta release, the number of users linking third-party services to Messenger has tripled, while data being shared has quadrupled.
Facebook and Twitter
"Nobody wants another Facebook," Dharmesh told Ars. So with the recent beta, Microsoft added Facebook integration. The beta has been out for just eight weeks in just seven languages. Despite these constrains, Microsoft points to
AppData, which shows that Windows Live Messenger already ranks fourth in daily active users who connect to Facebook worldwide. Specifically, about 4.6 million Messenger users are using the client to consume their Facebook feed, comment on something, or communicate with Facebook Chat users. Dharmesh didn't know the number of users on Messenger beta, but he said it was somewhere between 6 million and 10 million, which makes the number even more impressive.
At one point, Windows Live Messenger was capable of hooking up to Twitter and displaying tweets within the application. About three months ago, however, Microsoft killed its implementation and now Twitter support is nowhere to be found. Twitter's "anatomy of a tweet" changed in the last 6 to 8 months, according to Dharmesh, and Microsoft was no longer able to use tweets in Messenger. "We currently don't have the ability to integrate with Twitter in the standard approach due to the recent change of terms of use" he told Ars. "We want to work with Twitter 100 percent, but right now we can't do it."
