Redmond, Washington — Even though Hotmail faring turbulently for holding its ground as an e-mail client to the likes of growing Gmail and ring leader Yahoo, the software monopolist Microsoft product has recently been striving to reinvent its email by placing some formidable new features dubbed as “Active Views” for LinkedIn, Netflix, Posterous, and LivingSocial.
In a nutshell, the software giant is attempting to make it easier to do things like respond to social media networking requests and make purchases without ever leaving your email, has formed alliances with LinkedIn, LivingSocial, Posterous, Netflix and Orbitz, this means you can now interact with each of these services as if you were on their respective sites, without leaving the inbox. Pretty nifty.
Microsoft unveiled Active Views late last year, with services that converted text links for video sites like YouTube and Hulu or photo sites like Flickr into videos and slideshows. But yesterday’s announcement extends that technology to more types of businesses — including ones that rely heavily on email communication to get in touch with their customers.
“Earlier, we concentrated on popular types of emails with photos, videos, documents, and shipping notifications (e.g. YouTube, Hulu, Flickr, FedEx) and how we could make common actions easier,” said Hotmail Group Program Manager Dick Craddock.
“For those messages, we retrieved the important content from other websites and let you engage with it in an Active View that appears at the top of the message. This lets us take an email with a text URL for a shared video, and instead of just showing dull text, let you watch the video without having to leave your inbox.” “Now that we have a great experience for common attachments and links, we are taking a step forward with invitations, updates, ratings, and deals,” he added.
Hotmail’s new move is an upgrade for users and its new business partners.
“Now growing number of services employ email to let their members or customers know when something has happened, and most of these messages have a simple response — accept the invitation, comment on the photo, rate the movie.”
Microsoft hopes the changes will make people much more likely to take action based on emails; instead of having to click on a link, open a separate tab and go through a log-in procedure, people will be able to handle things like invitations as they get the message.
“In a conventional email with just a text link, the number of people clicking through is less than 10%. But, with Active Views, customers are now clicking on the video control in about 25% of all email messages with a video, as those actions happen right in your inbox, saving clicks and time, thanks to the work of partners like LinkedIn, Posterous, LivingSocial, and Netflix,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new partnerships.
LinkedIn also wrote a post about the advantages of the new service, saying it makes it “much easier to connect with people you may know or follow companies that you are interested in without leaving that email.”
Accordingly, employing the technology LinkedIn messages become an opportunity to take actions and connect with others without having to leave the inbox, explained Moses Ting, Design Lead on Communications Products at LinkedIn.
“At LinkedIn, our campaign is put the needs of our members first and to create products that help professionals be more productive and successful. Email is one of the many ways our members communicate with LinkedIn and now with Hotmail’s Active View, we are delivering increased functionality and efficiency without ever leaving Hotmail’s inbox,” Ting explained.
“With this interactive email technology, we have removed any extra steps normally required for professionals to stay connected via email.”
LivingSocial, an online discount coupon competitor to Groupon, believes deals emails are transforming into an opportunity to browse deals in real time, see how much time is remaining, and browse other deals.
“Be it the deal clock or our deal carousel, LivingSocial’s Hotmail members can interact with their Daily Deal in a whole new way,” said Rich Kilmer, vice president of research and development for LivingSocial.
Furthermore, below is a quick categorization courtesy of the company’s blog of how it functions with each of the new businesses, which will all now be able to encourage user activity without requiring users to leave their inboxes.
- LinkedIn: With Active Views, users will now be able to act on invitations and messages within their inbox.
- Posterous: The integration enables “inline commenting directly from an e-mail, and the message is updated when you open it to always show the latest comments.”
- LivingSocial: Now Hotmailers will be able to browse through various deals and their details (location, how much time is left) in real time – all from their inbox.
- Netflix: If you have a hotmail account, you can now see new recommendations and update your queue all without leaving the site.
Nevertheless, it is always pleasing to see new and interesting things happening in email, while some carry on with this notion that this medium is somehow dying by the hands of social media.