Microsoft has announced the ability to use your friends and networks in some social networks to invite them to Live, in particular to instant messenger. I like this in theory, but in practice I’m not sure how this helps the majority of people. The initial implementation (which is only for Facebook) is a bulk invite option that downloads your friends addresses into the Live framework and send out invite emails.
This could be useful if you are new to IM, or have a lot of new friends to add, but it seems like a lot of effort to go to if you already have a lot of your friends on IM.
What would be more useful would be if they put together an applet for Facebook that allowed me to select an IM invitation from my “my friends” page or when I am sending or accepting a friends request.
Its early days with the product and alliance so we will see what happens over time. For now it seems more like a good way for Microsoft to see who your FB friends are than anything useful. Some other commentary on Techcrunch.
