Daniel Sumner is a Platform Strategy Advisor on the DPE team (Developer & Platform Evangelism). Yep, his job title doesn’t make it clear exactly what he does! In his own words, “I focus on helping customers in Retail, Manufacturing and Services sectors innovate with using our latest technologies.” He’s also into cars and girls, but that’s another story. Daniel’s done us the honour of being our first guest blogger (he may get his own regular slot at this rate – anyone who fancies rising to the dizzy heights of guest blogger can contact us any time).
Is your website sociable?
In the UK I don’t think we’ve quite got to grips with how you can link your social audience to your website. Growth in social networks is mind numbing and the amount of data the sites are able to capture about you, your friends and your interests is significant. Despite the huge opportunity, to date the comment from the average web site owner has been “so what?”
The problem is, it’s not that easy to link social networking sites to content or retail sites, from a technical perspective or the commercial justification. Yet consumers have an increasing desire to share their online experiences and activities with their social groups. You just have to look at the rise in Facebook applications to see that trend.
Microsoft made a huge investment early on in social networking with Instant Messenger, an application that is used by almost half of the internet population in the UK. Messenger friends – unlike your Facebook friends – are likely to be much closer “real” friends to you. Most of us have around 15 people that we are will to share our presence with and allow them to interrupt us or communicate with us on an ad-hoc basis.
These friends also have opinions you value and share experiences you are interested in. The only way that these friends can actually share details via Facebook and/or Twitter is by retyping their experience into the update or status.
But all that is changing. If you are a user of LinkedIn, or Facebook, or TripIt for example you may have noticed the ability to link your status updates automatically when you have an update in another application. A service called Facebook connect does this. But we also have the same function appearing in the Windows Live platform, enabling you to link messenger to various social networking sites and perhaps more importantly allowing you to link a retail or content site to your messenger status.
So, for example:
1) You log into messenger and your status says; “So happy to be at work on Monday morning!”
2) During lunch you head over to retail site to check out a pair of trainers. You end up being unable to decide between some old school green flash Dunlop’s and some techno miracle shoe from Kobe Bryant. If the site supports messenger integration you could pull up a messenger widow inside the site, ping your buddies and ask them to evaluate your sartorial elegance in casual footwear, where they then send you to Puma by Alexander McQueen and urge you to rethink.
3) Having made your purchase, a site could immediately push a status update out saying “I just bought these very cool trainers at Puma by Alexander McQueen” with whatever links you wish. The site now has the ability to update you and your friends about your sneaker habit.
The mechanics of actually connecting up can be found on dev.live.com using the Web Messenger toolkit and the latest consumer versions of live on get.live.com. Enjoy!
