Winextra – Holy crap Microsoft why aren’t you shouting this from the hilltops?

One of the biggest pains in our modern web world is being able to keep track of all those people who we are in contact with across our social platforms. Contact lists are spread out all over the place. From Facebook to Twitter, Instant messengers to multiple mobile devices. Who can be found in which one is like a game of hide and seek.

Well it seems that Microsoft realized this and as part of the Wave 4 development of Windows Live they tried to find a way to deal with this contact list confusion as Omar Shahine outlines in a Inside Windows Live blog post

There are lots of places that people store their contact data – the address book for their email account, their Instant Message buddy list, Facebook, LinkedIn, their phone…. When you find that person you want to reach out to, is their information up to date? What about their email address? If they have more than one email address, which do you use? Are they online? Maybe you should send them an SMS or Facebook message.

My oh my, there are lots of ways to keep in touch!

Managing contacts just isn’t something people want to spend their time doing. Well, maybe some people… but I gather most of you would like an address book that is:

Up to date

Reflective of all the people you know on all the services you use

Available on all the devices you use (phone, PC, web)

In this release of Windows Live, we paid special attention to giving you exactly that.

They dealt with this by providing you with a dedicated Contacts site (http://contacts.live.com – some may not see the page until the complete Hotmail rollout is completed) where you can manage your contacts across the spectrum of services that Windows Live supports – or will support in the future I imagine.

One of the major irritation when it comes to managing your contact list is when combining them you suddenly get a whole slew of duplicate entries for individuals that you keep in touch with on various networks. This is something the Windows Live team realized as Omar pointed out in his post:

In planning this work, one problem we immediately recognized was that a lot of you have multiple connections with some of your contacts on Windows Live. For example, I have my wife on Messenger, Facebook, and LinkedIn. What I don’t want to see are three copies of my wife’s contact information in my address book.

To solve this problem, we automatically identify and recognize who all these same people are across different networks and build a virtual Person view of their data. We combine all the information we have about that person into a single view and make it really easy to communicate with them on the different networks they belong to.

Additionally, we keep this information fresh by continuing to sync data from your networks into Windows Live, ensuring that when information changes, you’ll always have the latest info. Finally, we let you annotate any contact data that comes in from a social network with your own information. For example, if you want to get a birthday reminder for a Facebook friend’s birthday but they haven’t included that information in their Facebook profile, you can add it in Windows Live, and we’ll remind you of their birthday.

This is the kind of thing that I have been advocating for a long time – a central place where we can manage all those contacts we make across multiple platforms. I know that Google has been working on this as well through their Google Profile and Contact pages but at this point what Windows Live is providing is the only answer I need and really appreciate.

If this is one of the cornerstones around which Microsoft is improving their social networking efforts around then it is a damn good start and I am really looking forward to what they have in the pipe.