While playing around with the new functionality in Windows Live last night, I noticed that they had a WordPress Web Activity.
Adding the WordPress Web Activity to my profile, it asked for my WordPress.com URL and provided suggested formatting of that URL on the textbox. While I do have a WordPress.com account, I don’t use it for blogging for obvious reasons – so adding that URL would have been rather boring for anyone viewing my Windows Live profile.
I assumed that Microsoft hadn’t necessarily collaborated with WordPress.com to allow that integration, after all, the information they are attempting to display within Windows Live is publically available through an RSS feed for a given site.
Making some assumptions about how Microsoft were going to perform their magic, I added in this blogs URL – even though the form suggested http://something.wordpress.com. After hitting submit, their service hit my site and found an alternative formatting for the content within the HTML (RSS), which gave them everything they needed for the integration.
Within a minute of me adding the WordPress Web Activity, the six most recent posts from this blog were visible within my Live.com Profile. Within my activity stream (all of my activity, not just WordPress.com), they were displaying the title, date posted and a short snippet as well with the title linked back to my blog to read the full article.
What I really liked about this piece of functionality was that the Windows Live team didn’t hobble their implementation with over zealous validation. They could have taken the hardline and not accepted anything not in the format of http://something.wordpress.com for a URL – however it would have severely limited its usefulness. Simply because of their forward thinking, millions of users who have their own WordPress blog that aren’t hosted on WordPress.com can now automatically have their posts published into their Windows Live profile.
