It’s official. The love affair between Microsoft and Facebook has officially ended.
What started out as a promising collaboration between the two giants have quietly fizzled out as Microsoft announced that the Facebook Integration feature on its Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 will be disabled .
There are also a dozen or more products and services from Microsoft that won’t be able to integrate with the social networking app.
According to key Microsoft players, this unwelcome development is due to a change in the Graph API that Facebook uses.
The feature has long been used by the company to connect its user accounts to Facebook. However, the Graph API has been updated recently and the changes appear to have a negative impact on all the apps and services that use Facebook Integration.
The Redmond-based company tried to explain these changes to consumers in a message posted on its site.
“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.”
The message further stated that all those features, which are also known as Facebook Connect, will no longer be supported because of the aforementioned Graph API update.
Facebook first introduced Facebook Connect in 2010 and it turned out to be such a boon to people who use Microsoft on a daily basis (and who doesn’t).
It definitely made things easier as Outlook users could find their Facebook friends’ contact information directly in their email list. Connect also enabled Windows Phone users to easily find contact information when they use the People app. Users could also share content from OneDrive with their Facebook buddies.
While the change is rather unfortunate, some sectors believe it’s an inevitable result of the social media giant’s change in priorities and direction.
It’s also not the first time that a Facebook and Microsoft collaboration ended not so happily.
Several years ago, the two companies were working together to integrate video calling on Facebook Messenger. But after two years, Facebook launched a different video calling feature and left behind Microsoft’s Skype.
There was no going back after that.
And it appears that there’s no going back after this either as the Facebook Connect shutdown appears to be a permanent one.
Users are advised to check out Microsoft’s support page for more information on the affected apps and services.
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