Summary: Microsoft creates a LinkedIn tie-up, not just a Facebook tie-up; it pays people to use its services and security in Microsoft's Web services is shown to be poor nonetheless (the company lobbies to slacken privacy laws)

HAVING recently hooked up with Facebook by sharing some more data^*, Microsoft now turns to LinkedIn. Microsoft Emil (Protalinski) and other Microsoft boosters from Seattle write about that. It's an attempt to integrate Web services with components of Microsoft Office and other such instances:

LinkedIn integrated with Windows Live, Facebook chat hits Hotmail

Microsoft has started rolling out multiple updates for the web services complementing Windows and Office. Over the last few months, the software giant has been regularly updating these services, but the number of features just announced implies today's releases are not a coincidence.

There is a similar treatment of Twitter as well (they pass data directly to Microsoft for example). A little later we'll write about security problems in Twitter. "Survey Finds Low Use of Microsoft Encryption Technology," says IDG and one of the company's former interns says that Microsoft admits that the Live@edu scam is not encrypted on servers.

Microsoft's head lawyer is working to change the law [1, 2] right now, in order to reduce privacy. This would help Microsoft when details about its clients leak, as they so often do.

“Facebook will give access to information which is otherwise quite private in order to help Microsoft's Bong [sic].”Yesterday we wrote about the implications of Microsoft controlling Yahoo!. There too exists some data for Microsoft to mine, not just in Facebook, which helps Microsoft's privacy intrusion [1, 2]. Facebook will give access to information which is otherwise quite private in order to help Microsoft's Bong [sic]. Furthermore, the fake donation tricks we alluded to earlier will be used to advance Bong. IDG and Mary Jo Microsoft play along with Microsoft's tricks, flaunting bribe and putting it euphemistically, hidden under "donation" banners ("avoid Google to help the world" so to speak). The conditions for entry are also troubling (thanks to Will for this link), but the Microsoft spin from MSNBC/Fool says, "Use Bing, Get Rich" (silly headline given what's actually involved ). MSNBC does not want to touch Silverlight (Silverlight it going nowhere), but it sure advertised it a few days ago by glorifying Netflix (Silverlight pusher with former Microsoft employees in charge).

The content of articles says "(Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)" Does that help magically eliminate bias or at least just warn about it? Some other blogs are referring to these latest changes as rather minor while Mary Jo Microsoft is spinning this as featureful and some describe it as a response to complaints, at least in Hotmail's case:

Microsoft has plastered Hotmail with yet more updates, after customers continued to complain about the firm’s recent shaky overhaul of its free web email service.

The software vendor didn’t want to draw too much attention to those gripes, by instead saying it had responded to user “feedback”

“Feedback” as in complaints [1, 2]. As always, watch out for hype. It's Microsoft's and Apple's main output. ⬆ ____ ^* One news site's headline asks, "In social media, is Facebook becoming the new Microsoft?"