Windows 8 In Depth

Setting Up Social Networks with the People App

For many years you could confidently claim email as the most popular Internet service. That’s still technically true, because most people who have Internet access have an email account, and according to The Radicati Group, there were more than three billion email accounts worldwide at the end of 2011. Even taking into account people with multiple addresses, that’s still a lot of accounts. But these days nobody even talks about email, not even to complain about message overload or the influx of spam. Now all anyone talks about is social networking, “friend” has become a verb, and a billion souls call Facebook home.

Microsoft has read the social writing on the wall, and in response they’ve baked social ...