Windows Live Mail – The emergence of a framework?

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I’ve been following Microsoft’s launch of Live.com or Windows Live as it’s officially called and the other offerings included under ideas.live.com. I’ve raved about Windows Live Custom Domains and I finally got an invite to try out Live Mail. Live Mail is essentially a replacement for Hotmail and it is AJAX enabled with 3-panes ala Outlook with drag and drop capabilities and a snappy and responsive interface. Firefox support is there but it still needs some work while IE offers all of the rich functionality.

I am a loyal Google Mail user and so I am not planning on switching over any time soon but it’s great to see Microsoft up the ante in the free email space and compete with Google and Yahoo. I still haven’t seen Yahoo’s new AJAX enabled email client and so I cannot compare but GMail is still very robust and feature-rich in comparison to Live Mail. Live Mail is still in early beta and so I am hoping the feature-set keeps on growing and offer Google a compelling reason to keep on improving GMail.

Here are screenshots of Live Mail Beta in action. I’ll post more after I spend some time with it but the calendar feature looks very nice. While Google calendar is still missing in action, Live Mail does have a nice calendar feature that competes with some of the Web2.0 calendar apps out there.

  • The Mail page or your Inbox view:
    windowslive-mailinbox
  • The Compose New Mail Page:
    windowslive-mailcompose
  • The Calendar Page:
    windowslive-calendar

The one thing that’s really interesting to me is the emergence of Live.com as a portal framework with ASP.NET 2.0, WebParts and all the stuff. Once Live.com is actually live and if it ever gets out of beta (maybe that will be Web3.0 :)), it will be compelling development platform for people that use .NET for their development. And where does that leave SharePoint?

microsoft, live.com, ideas.live.com, live+mail, ajax, .NET, webparts, asp.net2.0, sharepoint, scoble, google, gmail, yahoo, web2.0, web3.0, calendar

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20 thoughts on “Windows Live Mail – The emergence of a framework?”

  2. Pingback: Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Windows Live Mail: Hotmail revamped

  9. Hi
    Requesting Windows Live Mail Beta invite
    Thanks

    P.S. I’ll swap it for Windows Live Messenger 8 invite if you want one.

    Like

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