Importing Facebook Friends into Google+ and Instagram too.

When I first started using Google+ two nights ago it was a little bit of a ghost town.  With the exception of my friends who work at Google and a few members of the Silicon Valley elite, I could not find anyone else to friend.  Last night Google turned on invites which turned the ghost town into a little bit more engaging community.  The challenge is to find people you are already friends with on other social networks and add them to your Google+ circle.  Thank goodness for Yahoo (I can’t believe I just said that).

Over a year ago, Yahoo enabled importing contacts from Facebook into Yahoo Mail, and with Google+ you can import your Yahoo contacts and find your friends on Google+.  The steps to enable this are to log into Yahoo Mail, assuming you have an account.

* Import Your facebook friends via Yahoo:

http://www.ymailblog.com/blog/2010/03/facebook-friends-meet-yahoo-contacts/

* Then connect your Yahoo account to Google+ here:

http://plus.google.com/circles/find

To get your Instagram photos imported:

http://instaport.me

I could not believe how Google+ invites were flying around last night it was insane.  Google has turned them off for now.

Its been a little quiet from me in the past month as we are working real hard on writing code.  There is a lot of exciting stuff happening in the AIM world, and you guys will start seeing it in the near future.  In the meantime, I thought I would pontificate on the MSFT/YHOO merger and what it means from an instant messaging/social network point of view.  MSFT/YHOO already have inter operable messaging clients, and the success or failure of the move is debatable.  Due to MSFT’s sheer number of employees working on client development, one must believe that the Live Messenger client will be the one to survive.  I question really how this looks to the end user at the end of the day.  The reason being, that where Yahoo IM is huge, Live is not and vice versa.  Do they still skin a version of the IM client one for Live, one for Yahoo?  It would be very weird where one day if you are a Yahoo user you no longer sign into the client with the Yahoo name space.

It will be interesting to see if this deal really does close.  As MSFT’s stock loses value it makes the deal less attractive to YHOO shareholders.  In the 12-18 months this deal will take to close, AIM/ICQ and others will continue to execute our plan of record.  Lastly, it has been said by many, but combining two companies as big as MSFT and YHOO and getting the synergies right, is a HUGE challenge.