You know yesterday I posted about Facebook Chat in Messenger and in the same article wrote about Dharmesh Mehta, part of the Messenger team, mentioning a thing called Messenger Connect, well Microsoft have just announced it. The Next Web are reporting that it is a open standards, OAuth and Activity Streams, based API and appears to be a rival to Facebook’s Open Graph. It is aimed to replace some of Microsoft’s current APIs such as Windows Live ID, Contacts API and Messenger Web Toolkit which will give users a single ID around the web which will easily integrate with other third-party services.
Whilst writing this I see the Windows Live blog has been updated with a post about this, go check it out. The highlights they claim can be gained from Messenger Connect are:
- Instantly create a user profile and social graph: Messenger user profile and social graph information allows our shared customers to easily sign-in and access their friends list and profile information. This allows our partners to more rapidly personalize their experiences, provides a ready-made social graph for customers to interact with, and provides a channel to easily invite additional friends to join in.
- Drive engagement directly through chat indirectly through social distribution: By enabling both real-time instant messaging conversations (chat) and feed-based sharing options for customers on their site, developers can drive additional engagement and usage of their experiences by connecting to the over 320 million Messenger customers worldwide.
- Designing for easy integration in your technical environment: We are delivering an API service that will expose a RESTful interface, and we’ll wrap those in a range of libraries (including JavaScript, .NET, and others). Websites and apps will be able to choose the right integration type for their specific scenario. Some websites prefer to keep everything at the presentation tier, and use JavaScript libraries when the user is present. Others may prefer to do server-side integration, so they can call the RESTful endpoints from back-end processes. We’re aiming to provide the same set of capabilities across the API service and the libraries that we offer.
The service is currently being tested with a few large brands and companies to help Microsoft fine tune the service and then I guess they will open it up to all, this is very exciting.
And finally all the pieces are coming together, you know Wave 4 might just be worth the wait.
