Microsoft has announced a new partnership with five of the six most popular social networking sites. The partnership will allow users to more safely and easily share contacts with various Windows Live services. Prior to this agreement, this kind of sharing between services typically required an inelegant and potentially insecure process called “screen scraping.”

Microsoft’s new partnership includes Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, LinkedIn, and Tagged. Notably absent is the world’s most popular social networking site, MySpace, though that service uses an older version of Microsoft’s Windows Live Contacts interoperability and will presumably be on board with the new version in the future. Sites that are using this new version will see better performance and security, Microsoft told me during a recent briefing.

“We’re moving well beyond screen scraping and offering consumers something that is safe and secure,” John Richards the Director of the Windows Live Platform at Microsoft told me. “Screen scraping exposes users to unnecessary privacy risks.”

Microsoft’s agreement with these social networking sites is two-way and will be rolled out over time. Starting today, customers of Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger service can visit a new Web site, Invite2Messenger (www.invite2messenger.net/), where they can invite contacts from Facebook to join Windows Live Messenger (support for Hotmail, Bebo, LinkedIn, Hi5, and Tagged will be added in the coming weeks). Meanwhile, customers of Facebook and Bebo should be able to invite Windows Live Messenger contacts to those services beginning immediately.