The Outlook.com team has sent an email to its users informing them that the Outlook.com will stop supporting Facebook chat and Google chat in Outlook.com. It notified its users in the mail:
Within the next couple of weeks, we will be discontinuing support for Facebook Chat in Outlook.com….
While Microsoft attributed the decision to drop Google chat from Outlook.com as Google had decided to discontinue the chat protocol which was used by its Talk platform. As we can see from the Google Developers page notifying that Hangouts replacing Google talk and it not supporting XMPP, a standard for instant messaging. There wasn’t any reason mentioned for discontinuation of Facebook chat integration.
The Outlook.com team further mentioned to try the Skype for Outlook.com chat.
….. we hope that you’ll try Skype for Outlook.com chat, and voice and video calling, so you can take advantage of the more robust ways to keep in touch with friends and family. We’re confident that Skype for Outlook.com provides the best experience for chatting and making voice or video calls, right from your inbox, when the conversation warrants richer communication than an email exchange.
These updates to chat options in Outlook.com will not be impacting the connection to user’s Facebook and Google accounts. So the People page will stay updated with latest contact information from the services you’ve connected.
So those users using the Google or Facebook chat integration in Outlook.com can shift to Skype. Give it a try and share your experience.
