Microsoft kissing Hotmail goodbye

The company aims to draw users away from Gmail and Yahoo Mail

Microsoft on Tuesday began publicly previewing a new webmail service for consumers called Outlook.com that will eventually replace Hotmail.

Microsoft also expects that Outlook.com will draw people away from competing consumer webmail services like Google's Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

MORE FROM MICROSOFT: 12 new network features in Windows 8

With Outlook.com, Microsoft set out to "reimagine personal e-mail -- from the datacenter all the way to the user experience," wrote Microsoft official Chris Jones in a blog post.

Outlook.com features what Microsoft describes as "clean" and "intuitive" user interface that gives more prominence to messages and less to other elements, like headers and search boxes. It doesn't include display ads.

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With Exchange ActiveSync, Outlook.com accounts can be synchronized across a variety of devices, and it features native integration with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and, in the near future, Microsoft's own Skype.

This means that users can access content and notifications from those social media accounts within the Outlook.com interface.

Outlook.com also sorts messages of different types into separate buckets, so that e-mail from contacts, newsletter subscriptions, e-commerce notifications and social media content is arranged into different groups.

The new webmail service also includes Office Web Apps, the online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote along with the SkyDrive cloud storage service.

Once Outlook.com exits its test phase, it will replace Hotmail's user interface, although users will be able to retain their @hotmail.com, @live.com and @msn.com addresses as well as their contacts, messages, password and rules.

"While today's preview is just the start, Outlook.com is ready now to become your primary email service. We're expecting millions of people to try it out. Starting today, you can get an @Outlook.com email address, and we've also made it easy to get started with your current email address if you want to," Jones wrote.

Outlook.com is not to be confused with the Outlook email and calendaring PC application, nor with Outlook Web App, which gives Exchange users access to their accounts via a browser.

Useful Twitter search tool

Like other Twitter devotees, I encounter a lot of useful tidbits on Twitter. But while a tool like Tweetdeck allows me to more easily monitor lists of people and subject-specific hashtags I care about, it still relies somewhat on serendipity: that I'll see what I need when I happen to be monitoring.

But what if I want to search for something specific on Twitter among people I follow? Unfortunately, Twitter's own advance search page only offers up tweets that are fairly recent -- and there's only an option to narrow by specific accounts, not "my stream." Tweetdeck lets me search my stream, but only in a limited timeframe. If I want to search tweets from the last few months, you'll need another tool.

PostPost creates a searchable index of your Twitter stream that lets you look for tweets by term and then filter results by specific Twitter account. You can also narrow tweets based on whether they include links, photos or videos. This can be helpful if you're trying to find a tweet that you sent last year ("What was that cool mapping site I shared?") or, even tougher, a useful tweet that you know you saw awhile back, but you can't remember from whom. Or, perhaps you're researching a new subject and want to see what some of the smart people you follow on Twitter have had to say about it over the past few months.

PostPost today is touting an additional feature that aims to show you a personalized "trending topics" -- just among people you follow. I'm not finding this especially useful, perhaps because my timeline is being flooded by comments about the new iPad. Trust me, I don't need a tool to tell me the iPad is a "trending topic" among people I follow. And given that my list is weighted toward data-visualization topics, I don't need PostPost to tell me that "#dataviz" and "Web design" are popping up on my "Timeline Topline."

This particular feature might be more helpful if your Twitter timeline is somewhat broader subject-wise than mine is. But while I'll pass on the PostPost Timeline Topline algorithm, I'd still recommend PostPost for its original purpose: finding useful nuggets in your Twitter stream. If you want to look through more of your social networks, Greplin will index multiple sources including LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Docs as well as Twitter. But if you know that you're just seeking info on Twitter, PostPost is a useful option.

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