Invite2Messenger

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Wed, 01/28/2009 - 08:25

I don’t like Facebook for lots of reasons (how hard - and against their TOC - it is to get my data out being a big one), and one thing on Facebook that I used once and hated was their chat program (I don’t like browser based chat, not just Facebook’s). Thankfully Microsoft has solved that problem for me with the site Invite2Messenger, which lets you select your friends from Facebook and send them an invite to add you to Live Messenger. It is amazingly fast as well, working out which of the 120ish friends on Facebook have messenger accounts and which don’t in about 10 seconds and letting me have separate emails sent to each type.

The only downside to it, is that it doesn’t check who is already in messenger so a lot of my contacts got a mail asking to add me, even though they are in messenger. You can un-tick those manually… but I was lazy and this should be done automatically.

The thing that made me wonder is how Microsoft got access to that information, especially since all it asked for was the email address I use to sign in to Facebook. There was no prompt for logins or validation! In my untested theory based on running it one it may be possible to put anyone’s email in and get their friend list :( This seems like a security issue on the Facebook side… or maybe evidence of how much Microsoft’s little share in it actually has bought it!