“Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation. We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefitted from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.” – Microsoft statement on Google Buzz.
When one of the big guys launches a new product, competitors generally just sit it out and let the press do its thing. But Microsoft made a point of reaching out today with the quote above, criticizing Google Buzz as “another social network” and noting that Hotmail has aggregated Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and other services since 2008.
Of course Microsoft also owns a chunk of, and has a search deal with, Facebook. So they’re being threatened on a number of fronts. Still, just the fact that Microsoft is speaking on the record about Buzz shows that the guys in Redmond are a little worried. And they are not the only ones. → Read More
We’ll say it right off the bat: what the hell took Microsoft so long? Years after Yahoo and Google integrated web IM features into their free webmail services (Yahoo Messenger in Yahoo Mail and Gtalk in Gmail, respectively), Redmond is finally enabling users to log into their Hotmail accounts and converse with their contacts over instant messaging directly without the need to log on to Windows Live Messenger separately, or to even have the program installed altogether.
The new feature will be gradually rolled out, starting from today enabling subsets of users in Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and USA to send instant messages from the Windows Live Hotmail and People pages. The feature earlier rolled out to some users users in France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the UK. → Read More
Windows Live Hotmail (former Hotmail) is one of – if not the most – popular free webmail applications on the planet, so naturally there’s a bit of an uproar (warning: highly emotional teenager grunts here) since apparently users have been unable to access their mail account for hours on end. We’ve been getting a lot of tips about this in our inboxes, and we ended up taking a look at the official Windows Live Help website, where this message appears:
Hotmail and Windows Live ID experienced a service disruption starting at 8:44 PM (PST), which ended at 10:15 PM (PST), and during this disruption you may have been told your inbox did not exist. This was incorrect messaging. Your inbox, contacts and Live ID are all intact. We’re all Hotmail customers, so we appreciate how frustrating this experience was. Thanks for your understanding. If you’re still getting errors, please close out all browsers and sign in again.
With yesterday’s release of IE8 RC, I was reminded of an annoyance my partner had when I first installed Google Chrome because she was unable to use her Hotmail (short for the official name Windows Live Hotmail and not to be confused with Windows Live Mail) account properly using the new browser. I checked if the e-mail service – among the most popular webmail services in the world – was working better now that Chrome is a couple of months old, out of beta and – admittedly slowly – taking bits of market share on a daily basis.
Update: Google just got in touch with us to point out that they’ve just released an updated version of Google Chrome which integrates the work-around (see below) inside the browser so that non-techie users would be able to use both Yahoo! Mail and Windows Live Hotmail without any problems “while the Hotmail team works on a proper fix”.
No such luck. Apparently, with Microsoft’s latest upgrade of the Windows Live Mail service, things got really broken, causing users to be unable to write, reply to or forward e-mail messages. Evidently, these are essential functionalities that shouldn’t take a company of that size to fix within a day or two. So why doesn’t it still work after weeks and weeks of complaints (see here also) by Google Chrome users who still make use of their old Hotmail accounts for sending and forwarding messages to their friends? → Read More
