The development last year of the Outlook Social Connector plug-in gave users the ability to sync social networking feeds to Outlook contacts. The LinkedIn integration worked well but the new plug-in will be a huge step up, bringing Windows Live Messenger, as well as Facebook, to your Outlook inbox.

Don’t have the latest version of Outlook on your system? Don’t worry, Microsoft is also expected to release the new plug-in for Outlook 2003 and 2007.

What can you expect from the Outlook Facebook integration? Well, when you’re reading an email, not only will it capture the Facebook profile photo to allow you to see the person behind the name, you will also see uploaded photos, wall posts, status updates and other actions. Knowing when one of your clients’ has had an important milestone in their life, marriage, new child, or even just going on a vacation could give you the advantage over your competitors.

With the combination of social networking plug-ins such as LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook and Windows Live Messenger, you will be able to gain detailed knowledge of your contacts and clients interests and activities.

Updates in real-time are also to be a feature with the additional release today of an inclusion to the Social Connector plug-in. Any Facebook status updates from your contacts will also be sent to your inbox, removing the need for you to manually to refresh within Outlook.

The plug-in is expected to have its limitations however, with the exception of receiving friend requests, Outlook will only be able to grab information from Facebook. It is not expected that you will be able to update your status or ‘like’ posts through Outlook at this stage.

It is a ‘given’ these days that social network data is of growing importance to the business community, knowledge of what your clients and competitors are doing can give you the edge you need to succeed, although privacy will always remain a big issue.

The Outlook Facebook integration will only post feeds from email accounts linked to Facebook. The user will get the choice on what email accounts to link and if your Facebook account isn’t linked to your business email the data feed will not be posted.

For more information on the new plug-in Microsoft has released a short video – Facebook and Windows Live for Outlook Social Connector

The massive update provides plenty of great resources for those who enjoy entertainment related information and resources. The update to Bing includes:
Television – Hulu, CBS and Viacom have partnered with Bing to provide television episodes and videos that play straight through Bing. This collection of videos surmounts to over 20,000 episodes of television content and is growing every day.

The amount of video entertainment is only starting there as more plans on adding more networks as well as other supported video feeds as well.

Bing Gaming – As many as 100 casual games are now available free of charge or membership through Bing which allows users to have some great fun with their own one player game or with a randomized partner online. Cheat codes for hardcore gamers are also provided through the advanced Bing search for those who wish to play more than games on a browser.

Music Entertainment – Zune Music directly within Bing is now available. Searching for Lyrics to over 5 million tracks that are provided through Bing is easy to do. Music discovery is even easier now that users of Bing can provide 30 second samples of each and every song cataloged through the Bing databases.

Along with the entertainment content update, Bing runs faster than ever and can provide results on everything you need to make a decision on. Microsoft is trying to outdo Google by providing new resources and several features that are not provided by other search engines. There is still plenty of improvements that Bing has in store for the next series of updates.

Microsoft is moving aggressively towards trying to be an entertainment portal, but the problem remains is that the experience is fragmented. There is Bing, Zune, Xbox 360, Kinect, Windows, Windows Mobile, and I am sure some more other products that have similar features. The problem Microsoft has is a usability one. I want to be able to go seamlessly from one to the other to the other. When I am done gaming on my Xbox I want it to show on my Windows desktop so I can resume playing there. If I am playing on my Zune and I quit it syncs up and I can play at Bing, etc. Microsoft has a lot of work to do in this regard and it will be interesting to see what happens in the future.