Microsoft announced today that “Facebook chat is available to Hotmail customers worldwide, wherever Facebook is available”. Hotmail began integrating Facebook chat into Web Messenger last September, but it was only available in 6 regions. A few weeks ago, Facebook chat integration became available worldwide via the full Messenger client, and now this next step brings FB chat to Hotmail via Web Messenger as well.
According to the blog post, some two and a half million people have added Facebook chat to Messenger since Microsoft announced worldwide availability, bringing the total FB/WL connections to some 20 million.
The Windows Live blog gives instructions on how to connect Facebook to Windows Live:
To try it out, first connect your Facebook account to Windows Live and make sure the “Chat with my Facebook friends in Messenger” box is checked to give your consent to Facebook. We’ll link your accounts (this may take a few minutes), and you can start a chat from Hotmail just by clicking on the name of a Facebook contact. If this doesn’t work right away, sign out and back in again, and you should be good to go.
…which is a pretty simple process. Here’s the page:
