Spaces to Tap Users' Contacts

An update to MSN Spaces, Microsoft’s blogging and personal home page service, will leverage users’ contact lists to improve and drive more traffic to MSN services. The service has also changed in other ways, such as letting bloggers earn money in exchange for displaying contextual advertisements on their sites.

Windows Live Contacts

Messenger and Hotmail users have stored more than 13 billion names and addresses in their address books, but there’s little integration of these two contact lists, or among them and other MSN services. Microsoft wants to create a single contact store, known as Windows Live Contacts, that will be shared by many services. (Windows Live is the new brand that will be used for updated MSN services and some new online services.)

Information in Windows Live Contacts will be accessible throughout the Windows Live network, although users will control who sees them—for example, a user could share his work address with everybody on his Messenger contact list, while sharing his home phone number only with selected contacts.