When the new Windows Live Photo Gallery Wave 3 beta was first released, we gave you a review of the new features and one of those was the ability to add plug-ins for the application. One of the first 3rd party plug-in developed was the LiveUpload to Facebook plug-in, published on the Windows Live Photo & Video Blog, that allow users to directly publish their photos in Photo Gallery onto Facebook. One of the advantage of this plug-in was that it takes advantage of the people tagging feature in Photo Gallery and publishes this information onto Facebook as well. However, the first release of the plug-in had one shortfall – the people tags published from Photo Gallery had nothing to do with all the contacts you’ve already got on Facebook.

But fear not, as this is no longer a problem. The latest release of LiveUpload to Facebook 2.0 introduces the ability to link your Photo Gallery people tags with Facebook users! Better yet, these links are actually saved so the next time you upload the same people tags onto Facebook from Photo Gallery, it will automatically link that tag with the Facebook user! Here’s a screenshot:

What this means is that if all the people tags in your Photo Gallery are actually linked from your Windows Live People contact list (including those in your Messenger list or added to your Profile Network), you’re essentially linking your Windows Live contacts with your Facebook contacts – through Photo Gallery!

Although this is a 3rd party application, we’re seeing that Windows Live is having closer ties with Facebook. We’ve already seen the ability to import your contacts from Facebook into Windows Live (and vice versa), and we saw the announcement at CES 2009 that Facebook has signed on as a Windows Live feed partner, meaning that you’ll be able to get content posted on Facebook, including photos, directly in your Windows Live What’s New feed. What’s also coming in the future is that the upcoming update to FrameIt might see some integration with Facebook photos. As the two competing social networks are becoming closer together, the potential there for both Microsoft and Facebook is enormous. It’d be interesting to see how this relationship develops in the future.