New Hotmail

Ah, Hotmail, we had good times together didn't we?   I had my first e-mail address with you after all and I'll always cherish those memories.  It's been years since we've seen each other though.  I wonder if you've changed.  Damn, you look good!  Have you had work done?  Oh, you have!!!

Yes, Hotmail has gone through a metamorphosis and it's aim it seems is to take out Gmail.

Here are just a few of it's upgrades that Microsoft just announced.

Hotmail Highlights Gives you a quick overview of what’s new in your inbox organized by source, such as e-mail contacts or social contacts from Facebook or Twitter.

Sweep is a function which claims to be a simpler alternative to e-mail filtering, enabling you to quickly organize the messages that aren’t exactly spam, but that you don’t want at the top of your inbox.

Microsoft Office Web Apps allow you to edit documents directly from your inbox. You can also store the documents and photos you send on Microsoft SkyDrive, which means you don’t have to worry about size constraints because they live in the cloud.

The new and improved Hotmail also allows you to view photos in a slideshow or videos received from Hulu or YouTube right in the inbox. If you receive attached photos, you can see them in the form of a nifty slideshow.

And finally, Microsoft mentions some other features it hasn’t discussed in detail, like enhanced account protection, full-session SSL, multiple e-mail accounts, subfolders and contact management.

As far as the amount of users Hotmail has, they still have a commanding lead over Google, with an impressive 343 Million to Gmail's 150 Million.  But, in the tech world if you don't keep improving you're bound to start losing market share eventually so that's probably the reason for this overhaul.

The new version of Hotmail launches sometime this summer.

Source