Weathering The Storm Clouds

As you may know, the Sony Playstation Network was just recently brought back to life after being forced to shut down for almost a month due to meddling hackers.  I am not a gamer, but can just imagine how frustrating that must have been to not have access to those multi-player games, movies and more.  I know whenever Gmail or any of it's related services like Google docs or calendar gets knocked offline I start pulling my hair out.

And people are becoming more and more dependent on storing their files on the Internet.  Over the past two months both Amazon and Google have announced cloud based music services and just this week at the Google I/O conference the Chrome Books were unveiled which virtually can't function without web access, although some local storage is included and a few apps will be able to work offline.

Which brings me to the point of this blog entry.  No matter how bad you want it, don't allow everything you own to live in the cloud.  For sanity's sake, make backups or keep the originals on a local drive because you never know when those storm clouds will threaten.

One last thought before I leave.  How about one of you super smart developers out there make an "umbrella" app of sorts.  For example, whenever I create something online there's also an automatic option that pops up to download it to the machine I'm currently working on.  Emphasis on the word "option!"

What do you think? 

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.

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