Dare Obasanjo

Blurring the Lines Between Online Communication Forms: Integrating Email, Blogging, and Instant Messaging

Biography
Dare Obasanjo is a program manager on the MSN Communication Services Platform team. He brings his love of solving problems with XML to building the server infrastructure utilized by the MSN Messenger, MSN Hotmail, and MSN Spaces teams. Prior to this he was a program manager on the XML team at Microsoft responsible for the core XML application programming interfaces and W3C XML Schema related technologies in the .NET Framework.

Position Paper
The most popular forms of social software on the Web are those that either enable direct, synchronous communication such as instant messaging and email or that enable indirect, asynchronous communication via experience sharing such as shared photo albums and weblogging. In late 2004, MSN launched betas of MSN Messenger (an instant messaging client) and MSN Spaces (a weblogging service) as an integrated offering. In addition integration between MSN Messenger and Hotmail (email) was also debuted at the same time.

The MSN Communication Experience
One of primary problems with social software applications is that they are silos of personal information about the user. A user has a buddy list in an instant messenger, an address book in an email program, a graph of contacts in a social networking application such as Friendster or Orkut and so on. These lists of people the user knows are typically disjoint sets and often grow out of date. As part of the integration of email and instant messaging done by MSN in late 2004, users’ Hotmail address books and MSN Messenger buddy lists were merged. This meant there was a single list of people the user knows across the primary communications applications utilized by MSN users. The online status of Messenger buddies is available from their entries in the Hotmail address book and they can be sent instant messages directly from Hotmail. This unified contact list is also utilized by MSN Spaces; users can create access controlled blogs and photo albums that can only by people on their unified contact list or by people who they’ve given permission to interact with them via MSN Messenger. Users of MSN Spaces who appear in the buddy list of an MSN Messenger user will ‘gleam’ when they have updated their Space. A gleam tells an MSN Messenger user that their buddy has updated their Space and by right clicking on their buddy they can access the buddy’s contact card. The contact card contains a summary of the most recent changes to the buddy’s Space such as new blogs, music lists and photos that have been shared to the user. The user can then navigate to their buddy’s Space from the contact card.

The Social Impact of Blurring the Lines
There have been some unanticipated changes in the social behavior of users of Hotmail, MSN Spaces and MSN Messenger since the applications were integrated. One repercussion has been that users of both MSN Spaces and MSN Messenger tend to censor some of their blog writings because they know that people on their IM buddy list have instant access to their blog. When MSN Spaces first launched in Japan, it was not integrated with MSN Messenger and many of the early adopters filled it with candid opinions of their friends and family. Once the beta of MSN Messenger 7 was launched which featured integration with the MSN Spaces, many of these beta testers were unpleasantly surprised to find out that everyone who had them on their MSN Messenger buddy list had a direct link to their blog on MSN Spaces. The immediate fallout of this occurrence was several complaints from the early adopters of MSN Spaces in the Japanese market. The longer term fallout has been more guarded speech about interpersonal relationships by users of MSN Spaces who also use MSN Messenger. This observation is mostly anecdotal.

Conclusion
Integrating blogging, instant messaging and email has led to richer interactions between users of MSN’s communication services. In addition, this integration has also created new social behavior and cultural norms amongst users of the service. As these services mature and users begin to discover the degree of integration the question is whether they will embrace it deeply or will want again for the lines of separation to be drawn between these applications and services.

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