Yahoo! and Windows Live connections
We are happy to be announcing the immediate release of new connections to Windows Live and Yahoo! Mail. Over the last few weeks we’ve internally been testing and improving these connections. This post briefly describes these connections and how they work, what fields are support and a few caveats.
The most important caveats are:
- Windows Live authentication needs to be refreshed every 30 days
- Yahoo! Mail connection only does a one-way sync from Yahoo! into Soocial.
Windows Live
It’s great to be adding support for Windows Live (also known as Hotmail) users to Soocial. This is a huge audience and we are excited to finally offer Hassle-free goodness for these users too. The Windows Live connection can be added via your connections screen. Click the link in the bottom of the screen and connect it to your Windows Live account by logging in and allow Soocial access to your address book. Remember you can always remove access later. As mentioned above the Windows Live authentication which uses Windows Live Delegated Auth, which has a major flaw in that the authentication only works for 30 days maximum – after that it needs “refreshing”. Once the 30 days have passed we will show you a refresh button in order for you to easily re-add the connection in Soocial’s connection screen.
The Windows Live connections offers a full two-way sync that allows you to have a persistent address book across your computer(s), phone(s) and other webmail service(s). All other functions like backups, deduping etc works nicely with Windows Live.
There are some limitations when syncing with Windows Live that exist because of the limitations of the Windows Live contacts API. These include:
- First and last name only
- A single nickname
- No XMPP support and only support one for MSN field
- 1 email address per type: HOME, WORK or OTHER
- Windows Live has a weird email type called WindowsLiveID and is added in Soocial as an MSN IM account
- 1 phone number per type: HOME, WORK or OTHER
- 1 postal address per type: HOME or WORK
Yahoo! Mail
We are also pleased to be able to connect your Yahoo! contacts to Soocial as well. The benefit is that all email addresses you have in Yahoo! will get imported into your Soocial address book.
As mentioned above the Yahoo! mail connections works one way from Yahoo! to Soocial. It is actually more like a continuous automatic import from Yahoo! than a two-way sync. We are working with Yahoo! on this issue and hope to resolve it when Yahoo! upgrades their Yahoo! Contacts API.
Need support?
If you run into any issues please let us know on our community powered forum, we are very active there and it’s the best place to ask your questions! Also you can add your praise to Soocial there too! 
