We continue to believe that one of the best ways to provide our customers with great Microsoft product experiences is to let them connect to the other apps, services, and devices that they love—getting richer, more powerful experiences in both. From bringing Facebook into Messenger to letting you send email to your LinkedIn colleagues from Hotmail to powering the Twitter integration in Windows Phone's People Hub and more, we think it should be easy to use the services you choose. Your services should just work great together, without obstacles pushing you or your friends to "switch" services along the way.

Messenger and Facebook Chat is one of the key places where we're excited to see this come together—users love it, and we're literally seeing 100X the daily, per-user chat engagement from this approach compared to the traditional "federation" model. Messenger has been the world's leading IM service for many years, and about 5 years ago we worked with Yahoo! to start bringing the networks together. But at the time, all of us were frankly still quite worried about the risks of connecting, and so we took what clearly turned out to be the wrong approach for a "social" service like instant messaging, which is inherently about your social graph.

What we did at the time was "federation,” just like a traditional phone network or email service. If I use Messenger and not Yahoo!, and you use Yahoo! but not Messenger, but we want to chat with one another, I can send you an invite to become my "friend" on Messenger, and if you accept it, we're good to go. This does cover some good scenarios, but it's fundamentally broken for the most common case—if I'm a Messenger user and I've spent lots of time building my Messenger friends list, but happen to want to use Yahoo! or any other "app" as my device or client of choice, then I'm either stuck, or I have to re-spam every one of my friends with a new invite to "friend" me on this other service so we can do something we were already doing.

Again, this just isn't what most users need or want for a social app like messaging—I've got my social graphs where I've built them, and I want to just be able to choose the device or app I want to sign into those services and have everything just work. Said another way, I should be able to communicate with the friends I already have on the services I choose, without having to make them buy the same device as me or re-spam my friends with new invites.

By contrast, about a year ago we launched Facebook Chat integration, powered by the simple "connect" model where I connect my Facebook account to Messenger (just once), and the following just happens automatically:

  • All my Facebook friends are "just there"—no need to re-invite anyone.
  • I'm signed into Facebook Chat (just as if I was on Facebook.com) from wherever I use Messenger—whether that’s on a Windows PC, from Hotmail, on a new Windows Phone and more.

Picture of Messenger Facebook Chat on Phone

Chat on Facebook and Hotmail

We've posted before about the ongoing overall growth of Facebook Chat from Messenger—we're now at 5 billion monthly Facebook IMs in 984 million conversations from 12.3 million monthly active users.

Active Users Facebook Chat via Messenger

Monthly IMs Facebook Chat via Messenger

And while we're excited about that continued overall momentum, we also wanted to share how these numbers compare with the "federation" approach that we've previously tried, and that some services are still more focused on today. Even after 5 years of having federation with Yahoo, and even though for most of that time both Yahoo! and Messenger global IM traffic has dwarfed total Facebook Chat traffic, when we look at a typical day like July 31, 2011, here's what we see:

  • Facebook—164 million IMs from 3 million users, or 55 IMs/user. That's 3 million users (of our 35 million users who are actively using Facebook-connected features with us each month) signing into Facebook Chat from Messenger that day, which connects them to their ~130 Facebook friends automatically, and actively having about 10 IM conversations, each of which contains about 5-6 messages.
  • Yahoo!—24 million IMs from 48 million users, or 0.5 IMs/user. That's 48 million users who have invited and added at least one Yahoo! friend to their Messenger friends list, and have signed into Messenger and had a conversation that day. The average number of Yahoo! friends people have added is only 3.2 (not surprising since they have to re-invite them one by one), and the total engagement follows suit.

So in just 1 year of having used the open "connect" approach for IM, we're seeing 100 times the per-user engagement, and nearly 7 times the total traffic from a fraction as many users. And that’s after 5 years of building on the "federation" approach with Yahoo! You might wonder how much of this effect may just be due to the Facebook Chat audience itself being highly engaged. On a monthly basis, the level of engagement with Facebook Chat from Messenger is similar to what we see for active Messenger users in general—so while that’s part of the story, it’s mostly about automatically having all of your friends there, without having to spam them with invites again.

Jeff Kunins, Group Program Manager, Messenger & Connect Platforms

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