With Facebook unveiling their new social inbox, it looks like Google’s ancient nemesis is partnering with the social king in order to help make its online office suite a little bit more relevant.
Facebook’s new messaging platform integrates the Office Web Apps to enable Facebook users to view Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents with just one click. As you know, Office helps you create stunning documents that bring your ideas to life. Now you can easily share those ideas with your friends and family on Facebook. I’m really excited about being able to make it even easier for people to use Office to access and share information across different devices, networks and platforms. With the Office Web Apps on Facebook, you have even more ways to express yourself with Office and easily share your thoughts with people that are important to you.
So go ahead! Create a personalized invitation to your dinner party next Saturday with Word or share that killer PowerPoint presentation you delivered for your school project. Let your ideas run free and inspire you to create something unique and share it on Facebook using Office. (The Microsoft Office Blog)
Although Microsoft’s Office web app has a long ways to go before it will convince users to ditch Google Docs en mass, the partnership with Facebook could help users unfamiliar with office web apps choose Microsoft over Google.
Microsoft Office live is also currently offering users 25 GB’s of free storage in an attempt to woe current users away from Google docs (the latter who offers users 1 GB of storage, with 20 GB available for $5/year).
The Facebook integration thus far isn’t very intuitive (which doesn’t exactly surprise me).
However if Microsoft can find a way to make it easier to share as well as allow users to edit documents from within Facebook, Office live could easily challenge Google Docs, as well as help both companies take down a common foe.
Originally posted on November 15, 2010 @ 4:36 pm