Social Distribution

Messenger social is the “newsfeed” which is associated with a Windows Live user and shown to their Messenger contacts across Windows Live, including Messenger and Hotmail. The new Messenger full view is optimized for showing users their friend’s activity across a range of sites. For a limited set of partners (Facebook and MySpace today, LinkedIn coming soon) it allows users to comment inline back to these sites. For others, it allows users to share activities with their friends in Windows Live and enables users to click through to partner sites.

The simplest and most unique is the Messenger Connect sharing badge. This badge operates like other sharing badges, resulting in a social update. If the user chooses to; they can send an instant message to one of their Messenger contacts and have a conversation in real time about the content.

An individual entry in the newsfeed (aka activity) is known as a social update in Messenger. There are many different types (~ 20) of activities (e.g. pictures, comments, ratings), and when clicked they drive traffic back to the partner’s website.

The supported templates will be evolved on a quarterly basis as new activities become popular. Messenger Connect uses the ActivityStrea.ms format which is an emerging specification for making user activities portable.

A screenshot of the new Windows Live Messenger in full mode, activities appear on the left hand side

Screenshot of Messenger social in the Windows Live Messenger for iPhone

For a website to publish to Messenger social, push (via JavaScript and REST) and pull interfaces exist. The pull interface can be done with existing RSS or Atom feeds with minimal modifications. Below is an example of a comment and the corresponding Atom feed:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"      
 xmlns:activity="http://activitystrea.ms/spec/1.0/"  
 xmlns:thr="http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0" 
 xmlns:media="http://purl.org/syndication/atommedia">
  <title>Title of the feed</title>
  <id>http://www.contoso.com/profileid</id>
  <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="http://www.contoso.com/profile"/>
  <updated>Mon, 10 May 2010 14:12:21 GMT</updated>
  <entry>
    <id>http://www.contoso.com/profileid</id>
    <title>Cool Stuff</title>
    <published>Mon, 10 May 2010 14:12:21 GMT</published>
    <updated>Mon, 10 May 2010 14:12:21 GMT</updated>
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" 
     href="http://www.contoso.com/link_to_content"/>
    <content type="html">I think this is cool</content>
    <activity:verb>http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/post</activity:verb>
    <activity:object>
    <activity:object-type>http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/comment
    </activity:object-type>
      <title>Cool Stuff</title>
      <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" 
       href="http://www.contoso.com/link_to_content" />
      <link rel="preview" type="image/jpeg" 
       href="http://www.contoso/thumbnail.jpg"/>
      <summary>I think this is cool</summary>
    </activity:object>
  </entry>
</feed>

To let your users share activities from your site with their friends in Messenger social, visit this page. Additionally, if you know what the next big social activity type will be, leave us a note in the forum.

Angus Logan (@anguslogan)
Senior Technical Product Manager
Windows Live