There have been a number of high profile successful websites that have emerged over the past couple of years that have embraced and extended the initial concepts of Web 2.0 by offering what is known as social networking.  In essence, social networking involves connecting and sharing information with other like-minded people using web technology.  Sites like MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn are examples of modern successful social networking websites that follow a friend-of-a-friend model.  What do they have in common?  Well, to be a successful social networking site, you have to have members, and those members have to receive some value out of the site to keep coming back.  Most social networking websites are perceived as successful from the numbers of active members they have.  To get more members, you need existing members to invite new members - that is why most social networking websites are built upon the concept of inviting your friends to share information in your own network of friends.  Social networking websites must consider privacy and security to be successful otherwise members will not use the service.  As such, most social networking websites give the members full control over what information is shared in their profile and to whom it can be shared with.

Enter Microsoft's Live platform...  One of the challenges facing users on the web is the mirad of identities and passwords that they must manage on each of the websites that they use.  This is going to be more of a problem as more social networking websites get launched over the next few years.  Users do not want to manage a unique identity on each website and having to manage their passwords on each website seperately.  Each website has a different requirement for characters that can be used in a username and different password policies.  Users desire to have a single logon account to use on the web and to have many different websites using that same identity.  This is where Live ID comes in.  Live ID is a federated identity model that complies with open standards of today.  Microsoft allows third party websites to use Live ID as an authentication mechanism.  This allows a website developer to be able to allow users to sign up on their website using a Live ID authentication.  In turn, this eleviates the effort and problems that users typically have in signing up on each website they use.  In essence this eliminates the barrier to joining a website, which is a competitive advantage if your business and website rely on a strategy that requires maximizing the number membership accounts.  Live ID is a respected identity and is tightly integrated to many of Microsoft's own websites, including hotmail.  Users appreciate it when a website can support Live ID because they do not have to manage another set of website credentials.

As mentioned previously in this article, managed consent to sharing of information in a profile is key to the success of a modern social networking website.  Users will not fill in valuable profile information if they think that this information is going to be made available to a large uncontrolled audience.  They are concerned about their own privacy.  Privacy concerns are not limited to personal profile information - it can extend to all forms of tracking online activity, including weblogs, journals, pictures, and any thoughts that they share with their circle of friends or colleages.  It is critical to gain the trust of the user and one very important foundation of that is to allow the user to manage the policies for the release of information related to them.  Microsoft has carefully considered this and has built in a very extensible and reasonable model for consent management into the Live platform.

Applications that integrate with the Live platform must obtain managed consent from the Live services prior to the Live platform delivering information to that application.  This is done by registering an application with Microsoft and enabling links on your website that take the user to a page in live.com that allows the end user to approve or reject their consent for that application to get access to information or perform actions against their data stored in Live Services.  This puts the user in full control of their data and enables them to participate in a social networking website knowing that they have full control of their own data and can withdraw that concent at any time.

Windows Live / MSN Messenger has been a great success story for Microsoft.  There are hundreds of millions of users that are using MSN Messenger.  Most of these users have spent time adding their friends and colleages into Messenger so that they can quickly and easily communicate with them.  Integrating your website with Windows Live SDK will allow your website to be able to leverage this wonerful database to help build a larger membership database as well as to minimize the effort that users must spend in setting up their own circle of friends on your website.  Integration with Messenger Contacts is done through a consent-based approach where the website user can consent to the use of their Messenger contact list.  This can allow invitations to be sent to these contacts, and for deep integration with the online presence and other capabilities of Messenger.  This capability significantly reduces the effort to get new members and have existing members set up permissions for their data in your website.  These are two significant hurdles for any new social networking website.

There are quite a number of applications and services that are part of the Windows Live family.  The applications that are added to this family evolves quickly, so please don't consider this as an authoritive list.  The applications that are currently part of Windows Live include the following:

Live ID - Single Sign-on Authentication common accross all Live services.

Messenger - Instant Messaging communication.  Contact List.

Spaces - on online presence for users to manage their own personal page, files, photos, events, blog, and more.

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Alerts - receive notification on many different events.

Mesh - a new offering that is currently under development.

Virtual Earth - Mapping solution