Redmond, Washington — Software monopolist Microsoft is leveraging its huge webmail user base to get a piece of the social-networking pie. The Redmond Vole on Thursday unleashed several updates to its free Hotmail service, after users continued to complain about the firm’s recent shaky overhaul of its free web email service, including tie-ins with Facebook and LinkedIn–the personal and business social networks of record, respectively.
The software vendor did not want to attract too much attention to those gripes, but rather calmly saying it had responded to user “feedback”. But since the re-launch of Hotmail this summer, the company has repeatedly applied patches to the live service. Worse still, the company poured plenty of ad cash into the makeover — which clearly showed that MS had lots of faith in its new-look Hotmail at release in June.
The recent update includes increased photo-sharing size to 25MB per e-mail and introduced some new features to Hotmail. These consists of: real-time package tracking, communicate with Facebook friends, sharing photos more easily with extended coverage and new features, viewing more videos from inside Hotmail, and managing and finding important email with subfolders.
“Emails that contains a package tracking number will now become light up in Hotmail thanks to ActiveViews, which automatically recognize the number and display the real time shipping status above the email, saving you a trip to the shipper’s website,” explains Windows Live Hotmail Group Program Manager Dick Craddock. “The US Postal Service is fully supported, and with this latest update, our new partner FedEx will be as well, with light versions for DHL and UPS that provide a link to the shipper’s website instead of full shipping details inside the email.”
Writing in the Vole’s blog, Microsoft group program manager for Windows Live Jeff Kunins mentioned that the latest revamp brings in contact connectivity across Hotmail, Messenger and the rest of Windows Live, in addition described four objectives of the LinkedIn partnership:
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The Windows Live Home page now can show updates from Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace, as well as those from Flickr, Pandora and Youtube.
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Keeping your contact list organized with auto contact linking across Hotmail, Messenger and the rest of Windows Live.
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Helping you use Messenger to keep up with what your LinkedIn contacts are doing.
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Making it simple to share updates from Messenger to your LinkedIn contacts.
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Helping your Messenger friends keep up with what you’re doing on LinkedIn.
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Facebook chatting has already been implemented in Windows Live Messenger, but today’s release puts it in Hotmail’s webpage chat options as well.
Furthermore, Hotmail’s photo-sharing capabilities are rolling out from only the U.S. to the rest of the world. “Email is the most popular place to share photos, with 1.5 billion pictures shared each month on Hotmail alone,” says Craddock. “But small attachment size restrictions have long made the process cumbersome. Over the summer release, Hotmail became the first service to let you to send hundreds of large photos per email, up to 10 GB of photos per email, by sharing them as a new photo album on SkyDrive. Today, this option is only available in the US, but with this release, we are rolling it out worldwide.”
“We have kept ourselves busy this summer,” said Craddock. “Following this release, you may have observed a string of smaller updates. Some were planned, like push email, calendar, and contacts through Exchange ActiveSync, but others were the results of feedback we received and acted on during the roll-out.”
“We devote a lot of time and energy into careful planning, but we also recognize that with any release, we can improve, so we do our best to listen closely and respond actively to feedback,” Craddock said.
The slide-show of tweaks can be viewed here.