The 'Social Connector' built-in to Outlook 2010, and as a downloadable plug-in for Outlook 2007, is a useful thing. I'll admit I scoffed at it as being some fluffy thing I didn't really need in my Outlook but after setting it up this week and seeing what it does, I am happy to have done so, and I recommend it.

Essentially, when you set this up and provide permissions to your social networks (I have set up Facebook, LinkedIn and Windows Live), Outlook will pull information into a pane based on sender email addresses, and present you with the sender's picture as well as an aggregation of past emails in your Outlook, plus status updates and postings from their social network accounts, assuming you're connected with them on the applicable social network.

If you're not connected with them through a social network, but they do have a social network account, their public information will be displayed, and a link is there for you to click to send them an invitation to connect.

Very handy and useful. I like those kinds of tools.

Here's some links to text instructions for installing:

Outlook 2010

Outlook 2003/2007

And here's a couple of videos: