Frederic from ReadWriteWeb recently noted the large number of people who have connected Facebook and Messenger. As it’s now been about one month since we released Windows Live Essentials 2011, we wanted to take a moment to talk more about our progress in building partnerships with Messenger that help customers connect to their friends and networks from across their devices.

More than 10 million people have connected Facebook to Windows Live

In the last few updates, we made a number of changes across Windows Live that made it both more valuable to connect Facebook to Windows Live, and easier for you to do this. We’re still early in the release, but to date, over 10 million people have connected their Facebook accounts with Windows Live. One thing that excites us about this is not only the scale of this adoption but the fact that it is already 6 times more than we saw in all of Wave 3 (our previous set of releases).

When Windows Live customers connect to Facebook, they have a number of options to select from, in terms of how their data moves across the two networks.

More than 250 million chats between Messenger and Facebook

One of these options is the ability to chat with your Facebook friends from within Messenger. Because there are a number of complexities involved in integrating two huge, real-time communication systems, this chat option is only available in 13 countries around the world. That said, there have already been over 250 million chat conversations between Messenger and Facebook customers, and these conversations have lasted more than 1.5 billion minutes. We’re excited to see how this is continuing to grow as more people connect their Windows Live accounts to Facebook and as we begin to offer chat integration in more countries.

Millions of people connecting to other sites

While Facebook is clearly one of our largest Messenger partners, there are more than 75 other great companies that are similarly being connected deeply with Windows Live. And from these, over 1.6 million people have connected YouTube to Windows Live, and over 700 thousand people have connected MySpace to Windows Live.

Available across your devices

Partnerships are not only important for connecting Messenger customers with their networks, but they’re also critical to making sure customers can stay connected across their devices. On the PC side, many device manufacturers and retailers are choosing to pre-install Windows Live Essentials on their new Windows 7 PCs – helping bring together a complete Windows experience. We’re continuing to work with these partners to make this possible, and we expect over 100 million new consumer PCs to ship with Windows Live Essentials next year.

On the mobile phone side, Windows Live is deeply integrated into the newly released Windows Phones and we’re looking forward to seeing the adoption and hearing your feedback on that experience. But many of you are currently using other smart phones, and we think it’s important that you can also use Messenger from those devices. So we work with our partners to ensure that we have great experiences for their devices, and we’re seeing some good adoption and usage of the latest mobile experiences for Messenger. There are over 10 million active Messenger customers on BlackBerry devices, over 5.2 million active Messenger customers on iPhones and over 1.2 million active Messenger customers on Nokia smart phones. And through our mobile service provider program, app developers are able to bring Messenger to tens of millions more customers on other phones.

Helping customers connect to the networks and people that matter to them is very important to us, and so we appreciate the opportunity to be able to work with all the great companies that are connecting to Windows Live and those that are making Messenger available on their devices. And most importantly, we’re glad to see our shared customers making these connections to improve their communication and sharing experiences across more of their devices.

Dharmesh Mehta
Director, Windows Live Product Management