"Dragon-Slaying Techniques (I) -- Preface and Windows Live ID | Wai's Blog 2.0"

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with a series of newly launched Windows Live APIs from Microsoft. These primarily involve the Windows Live ID and Windows Live Contacts. You can refer to another translated article of mine for more details. I used the Web Authentication mode and Proxy Authentication mode of the Windows Live ID. The former mainly allows login verification via Live ID, while the latter is primarily used to request access to Windows Live Contacts using the proxy token issued after authentication.

In simple terms, this means logging into this website (http://mashup.49city.com/test/delauth/default.aspx) with your MSN account (now called the Live ID account for Live Messenger), and then asking if you authorize the program to access your contact information (apparently all your friends on MSN and all your contacts in Hotmail). This way, all your contact information will be displayed to you (if your friend isn't someone lazy who hasn’t left any information, it will include their personal profile, location, email, and phone number. Each piece of information is further divided into personal, family, and work categories).

Still wondering, what’s the point? Well, it's not entirely useless. Not long ago, I received an invitation email from Hi5, which asked me to log in and enter my Hotmail account password. I trusted Hi5 fully, and they pulled out all my contacts from Hotmail, automatically checked them all, and then very morally asked me if I wanted to invite these people. So, after uploading a cool photo of myself and a big golden retriever, I sent out a mass invitation email to all my Hotmail contacts. (I apologize to all friends who received this spam; I really didn’t mean to send photos to everyone just because of self-admiration). Isn’t this a pretty dirty but effective way to promote a website? It spreads like a virus and has strong targeting. Speaking more humanely, perhaps it could further integrate contacts from other social networks and export them to various terminal devices, such as mobile phones and PDAs. (Without Google, I already know that someone must have thought of and done this, but it seems that no one has done it perfectly yet).