If more services are added (including the ability to post to your Facebook page), Hotmail could become a central point for your communication on social networking sites.

Hotmail integrates with social networking sites in another very important way as well: It includes your contacts from those sites in your Hotmail contacts list. That way, you don't need to go to multiple places to find contact information; it's all right in Hotmail. A nice touch is that it categories your contacts for you as well, showing you contacts from Facebook, Messenger and so on. You can also view them all together, uncategorized.

When you view a contact from a social networking site, you'll see his contact information and can also jump directly to his page on, say, Facebook. I found one aspect of the way that Hotmail integrates with social networking sites confusing, though. When I was in Hotmail and was looking at a contact who is one of my Facebook friends, there was a message "You're not friends with Barbara. Add as friend." In fact, what it was doing was showing that I wasn't friends with that contact on Windows Live Messenger -- but it didn't specifically mention Live Messenger in the message.

The newest version of Hotmail integrates with Outlook through the recently updated . That's the good news.