You might have already noticed that Outlook is no longer being updated with information and pictures from Facebook. In addition, you’ll see an “Invalid user name or password” notice in the People Pane and Social Network Accounts dialog. This is because Facebook has discontinued support for the so-called Graph API that is responsible for synching Facebook content with other applications.
In other words, this doesn’t only affect the Outlook Social Connector but also many other Facebook Apps or Facebook features that are integrated in other applications.
For instance, Facebook Calendar and Contacts sync with Outlook.com and the People hub on both Windows and Windows Phone no longer works and will no longer provide Facebook updates from your contacts either. For an overview of the affected Microsoft products see: Facebook Connect is no longer available.
It might currently still work for you but it will stop functioning eventually when Facebook completes the rollout of the change.
Social Connector lost its usefulness?
Now that it has lost support for both major social networks (LinkedIn and Facebook), the Social Connector (People Pane) in Outlook is therefor of little use to most.
The recent emails feature is still useful for some and for organizations that are actively using the user profiles in SharePoint the connector could prove valuable as well. The Social Connector Provider from Viadeo and Xing still work as well.
When you rather see a few more lines of your email than a mostly empty pane, you can disable the People Pane via: View-> People Pane-> Off
No Alternatives
Now that Outlook.com is moving to Office 365, we might see Outlook integration return via an Office Web Add-in just like LinkedIn, but it is more likely that Facebook rather see you use their app instead. So far, no alternatives have been announced by Facebook.
