While Windows Phone and other Microsoft platforms receive little to mixed support from developers, there was support for a very useful integration Facebook with your Microsoft Account. Unfortunately, as spotted by Windows Central, Microsoft announced today on their Office blog, that due to an update by Facebook to their Graph API, Microsoft’s Facebook Connect features will no longer be supported.
Today’s post explains:
“Facebook has made an update to their Graph API that will impact Microsoft apps and services. Facebook’s Graph API is the tool that we use to connect your Microsoft account to Facebook. It brings contact information from your Facebook friends into Outlook.com and the Windows People app, keeps those contacts up-to-date, and provides options in apps and services like Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, and OneDrive.com to share to Facebook. We collectively refer to these features as Facebook Connect. Due to these changes, Facebook Connect features will no longer be supported.”
With the loss of the Facebook Connect, your Windows People, Photo Gallery, OneDrive, and others, will no longer seamless and automatically sync with your Microsoft account. The blog does offer a few work-arounds, such as sharing and subscribing to your Facebook calendar from your Microsoft calendar and how to post images on your own to Facebook. But all in all this is a substantial loss in a well designed feature which was integrated across a wide range of Microsoft products.
The full list of services affected are:
- Outlook.com Contacts
- Outlook.com, Windows , Windows Phone and Office 365 Calendar sync
- Windows 8.1 People app
- Windows 8 People app
- Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 Calendar app
- Windows 8 Photo Gallery and Movie Maker
- Windows 8 Photos App
- Windows Phone 7 and 8 People app
- Windows Phone 7 and 8 OneDrive
- Windows Phone 7 and 8 Photos
- Windows Live Essentials Calendar and Contacts
- OneDrive Online
- Outlook Social Connector in Outlook 2013
- Office 365 Outlook Web App
A long list to be sure and one that was full of useful integrations that gave many Microsoft products a reliable integration with social media, especially Windows Phone which prides itself as being an OS that centralizes your news and accounts in quick glance manner, such as the People app’s now unsupported ability to bring your Facebook feed to your Microsoft services without having to click into the Facebook app.
Update: A Microsoft spokesperson provided us with this further bit of information:
Due to changes in Facebook’s latest API, Microsoft will no longer support Facebook Connect, a service that integrates some Facebook content with a Microsoft account. We are proactively working with customers to communicate the changes.
Further reading: Facebook, Microsoft, OneDrive, Outlook, People, Windows 8, Windows Phone
