Profile

Q: Why can’t I connect the Twitter service to my Windows Live Profile?
A:
There had been policy changes made to Twitter on June 30, 2010 which prevented your tweets to be imported to Windows Live. You can read more information about it here.

In the mean time, if you still would like your tweets to be viewable by your Messenger friends, you can connect Twitter to Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace, and then connect any of those services to Windows Live. (via Michael Chang, Group Product Manager – Windows Live Messenger)

Q: I’ve connected the Facebook/LinkedIn service to Windows Live, but my Facebook/LinkedIn contacts are not appearing / have not been de-duplicated with my Windows Live contact list. What should I do?
A:
Sometimes after you’ve connected the Facebook/LinkedIn service, your Facebook/LinkedIn contacts may take some time to get imported and de-duplicated into your Windows Live contact list. Give it 24-48 hours for it to happen.

If you had previously added the Facebook web activity to Windows Live before the Wave 4 launch (June 7, 2010), try removing the Facebook web activity, then reconnect the Facebook service to Windows Live again. You can do this by going to http://profile.live.com/services.

Q: My contacts from Facebook/LinkedIn are de-duplicated in Messenger and Profile, but not in the contacts view of Windows Live Mail. Why is this?
A:
When Windows Live finds two contacts that it believes are the same, it will mark them as such in its database without actually merging the contacts – it is just extra information that gets stored with the contacts.  Then each ‘view’ of contacts can decide whether it wants to use that extra data to display each contact separately, or to visually merge them into one. For example in Messenger (and some Hotmail views) you can show your contacts merged, or teased apart individually.  In Windows Live Mail, contacts will show you each and every record individually. 

Based on Microsoft’s research data, it shows that most users use Windows Live Mail’s contacts view to ‘manage’ their list (as opposed to Messenger, where people mostly ‘find a person to chat with’), so it was decided that showing each contact independently in Windows Live Mail’s contacts view is a better choice – it is easier to edit / delete each record. Unfortunately, Microsoft did not have time to add the options to merge / tease apart contacts in this view. (via Piero Sierra, Group Program Manager, Windows Live Essentials)

October 2nd, 2010 at 4:04 am