The My People feature, new for Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, is designed to streamline communication with the handful of people with whom you communicate most often. You’ll know you have My People when its new icon consisting of two head outlines shows up in the Taskbar’s notification area after you update to the new version.
The idea behind My People is to let you more easily email, chat with (via both text and video), or send files or media to your closest contacts, friends, and loved ones. It also introduces a cute instant emoji notification for those closest contacts. Appealingly, My People is designed to save you from having to open up separate apps in order to do all those things.
At this early stage, only email, Skype, and the emoji sending capabilities are enabled, but any UWP app will be able to take advantage of it. I have no doubt that Facebook Messenger and other messaging apps will be available to connect with My People in short order.
I tested the new feature on a Microsoft Surface Book with a Core i5 CPU, 8GB RAM running 64-bit Windows 10 Fall Creators Update.
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1Get Started
After you update to Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, you’ll see this new icon in the Taskbar’s notification area. Tap it to get started.
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2Connect Apps
Before you can use My People, you have to connect the communication apps it works with. At this point, only Skype and Mail are options. If you’ve signed into your email accounts in the Mail and Skype apps they’ll already be connected. Also, the People address book app is connected from the get-go.
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3Find and Pin
If you’re updating a PC you’ve used for a while, you’ll see your top five contacts suggested. On a new machine, you can just choose the Find and Pin contacts option found at the bottom of the People bar. Tap this to show all the contacts in your address book. You can only pin three contacts as circular icons to yoru taskbar, but you can add more to the My People bar itself.
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4Combine Duplicate Contacts
Since your contact probably has different email and Skype accounts, you can combine them here.
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5Using My People
At this point, I could only, as you might expect, interact using Skype or email. But the cool thing about using My People is that you don’t have to open the separate Mail or Skype apps in order to email or chat. You can even read previous emails with the friend in the small window. Voice or video calling with Skype does open the separate app window, however. With email and chat, everything happens right in the small pinned window.
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6The Best Part: Emoji
This is the cutest part of My People. When a pinned contact sends you an emoji from Skype, it pops up from their pinned icon as a big, unmissable—and animated—smiley.