Navarr's Tech Side The Technical Side of my Life

MySpace Outlook Social Connector

Its simply amazing that the MySpace Outlook Social Connector was released 8 days ago and nobody has noticed yet, except for a few people that still care about the old social network.

For me though, MySpace’s Social Connector has really highlighted at least one bug with OSC and, well, multiple problems.

The one bug is that I can not connect to both my Linked In account and my MySpace account at the same time.  Why?  Because I use only one email address for both of them, and you can’t connect with the same username more than once, even if you're connecting with separate service providers.  This obviously needs to be fixed.

As for problems: I now have a MySpace Contacts list, which is really awesome and everything, except that it only works with MySpace.  It only uses their MySpace email address, so if I casually email someone that has a MySpace, I sincerely doubt it’ll show up at all in the OSC, nor will it tie their feed if I’m a friend to them to their email because the only email that shows up in my contacts is their @myspace email.  Quite useless, especially compared to Linked In.

What’s more bothersome is how badly this connector was programmed.  The installer wanted to create its own directory in my start menu (I have no clue why, you’re simply a social connector, why do you need a whole folder in my start menu?  Wasting Space?  Uninstaller?  What the heck do you think Add or Remove programs is for??) and when connecting to MySpace it was substantially slower than connecting to Linked In.  With Linked In, it was almost immediately connected and downloading, but with MySpace it just took FOREVER.

Obviously though, this is a pre-release version, and hopefully they’ll iron out the problems with both Outlook Social Connector and the MySpace Connector before Office 2010 is released.