Micrsoft’s next version of Outlook, Outlook 2010, will have social updates built right into it. This would enable the users to keep a tab on the social updates of their contacts. Whilst there have been multiple plugins for Outlook that tie Microsoft’s mail client to various social networks, this is going to be the first time for these features to be built into the application itself. This feature is called Social Connector and currently pulls information and updates from LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace. Twitter is conspicuously missing but no conspiracy theories have been reported yet. It will just be added later in all likelihood.
There’s actually already a project like this in the market and it is one that Microsoft actually thought of buying at one point, some two years back. This is a social email project called Xobni and the funny part here is that this is also a plugin for Outlook and not an email client unto itself. With the latest social features taken into account, Outlook is thus actually starting to resemble one of its plugins.
The main purpose of such features inside an email client is to make it easier for the user. Email is as it is an old way of communicating that is just passé in today’s world of real time communication. And the mail client is pretty much a dead box of communiqués that are already old when they are downloaded to the computer. So by having an email client that is connected to the social networks, that dead old place can be made much more useful. Especially in situations when you are composing emails. If you knew your best-friend’s dog had passed away moments ago, you would’ve avoided emailing the cute doggie site you just found out about. And other such faux pas.
The bottom line here is that the web is going real time and social and communication applications like mail clients are especially burdened with keeping up with that trend. Besides, it also help people feel connected and find out relevant information. For example, hyper local news has never been the same after Twitter came on the the scene and that has actually helped out a lot of people. From avoiding traffic jams to being the first to break a major local story, social networks have completely changed the way we communicate.
Social Connector will (thankfully) be compatible with pat versions of Outlook, so those who do not want to upgrade don’t have to feel left behind. This is especially true for enterprise players — businesses are far too slow to administrate IT changes as major as browsers and mail clients. This can be really frustrating for major software vendors like Microsoft — you can’t not think of your biggest clients and yet to keep them in mind you have to slow down advancements. Sad situation really.
Currently, the beta version of the Social Connector features seems to crash prone. Several complaints from users all over the place make that part really clear. For some, Outlook actually stopped working altogether after Social Connector was installed.
The comparison between social connector and Xobni is actually hard to avoid because they do the exact same things. Whilst the logical reasoning would say that a built-in feature would render similar plugins redundant, Xobni might still have the upper hand at this point. Its has an extremely (extremely) loyal user base, it has a faster mail search function than Outlook’s own search and the dev team plans to eventually expand it to other mail clients. Xobni has so far been downloaded over 4 million times. However, the final release of Social Connector might change all of this. So we’ll just have to wait and see.
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