Paul Thurrott has had a peek a the new version of Hotmail, due out next year, and has some nice things to say about it.
It seems quite nice – but I can’t imagine switching from Gmail for a couple of reasons:
I mean, take a look at this screenshot and let me know how you’re suppposed to read a message through all of that. And am I missing something, or is the entire right side of the message M.I.A.?
Granted, the screenshot is at 1024 by 768, but that’s pretty close to the width of my browser. And you know that the bar on the right, which is now a helpful tip on how to use their program, will eventually be horizontal banners. And what exactly does it say about the ease of use of your product when you have to devote that much of the screen to telling people how to use the thing?
They mention the Mac programmers that they brought on to help them, but who are the usability geniuses that said, “Screw the message – what we need space for is ads and interface”? Helpful tip to Microsoft: Fire those idiots.
How they plan on competing with Gmail is beyond me. Maybe they could ditch the ads and get an Adsense account.
Google Reader, a competitor to BlogLines (especially now that they’ve been bought by AskJeeves) debuted today. I imported my .opml file, and everything works pretty well. I like the keyboard shortcuts, and the interface is much friendlier than BlogLines.
But without a Google Reader Extension for Firefox, it’s going to be hard to switch. Also, since they’re just ramping up they don’t have a lot of the feeds that I read cached yet.
Anybody else have a chance to try it?
To work with my new car.
