Hotmail is ten years old this month. It's worth remembering how crucial Hotmail was in making email mainstream, even if we were all eventually put off by the Microsoft's 1998 purchase, increasingly voracious spam and that extremely unpleasant 'feature' of an account that closes if you don't check it for 30 days.
I do still have a Hotmail account, more for nostalgia than anything. From the birthday blurb, which isn't short of praise for the way Hotmail revolutionised communications and such like:
- Hotmail now has 270m active accounts worldwide - 8.8m users in the UK - In 1996, 6% of UK households had web access, compared to 58% today - And one billion emails are sent to Hotmail accounts every day. But how many of those are spam?
• Microsoft announces book library project
Microsoft is pitching itself against Google's controversial project to digitise the world's books. A new Live Search Books feature will launch in a US trial as Microsoft's own version of an online library. Initially it will focus on books that are out of copyright, including titles at the British Library, New York Public Library, American Museum of Veterinary Medicine and some Californian and Toronto-based universities. Google already has deals with Harvard, Oxford and other universities.
A spokesman told AFP that that project was created with copyright in mind - but no doubt profit wasn't far from their minds either: the potential advertising revenues from targeted display ads alongside book searches is huge.
• MySpace to block sex offenders in the US within a month
Alongside copyright issues the potential for online sex offenders to prey on young users of social networking websites is the biggest threat to the likes of MySpace.
To tackle this, MySpace has struck a deal with Sentinel Tech Holding Corporation to identify and block convicted sex offenders.
The new technology, called Sentinel Safe, will let MySpace search state and federal databases to seek out and delete MySpace profiles of registered sex offenders. The target for completing the purge is 30 days. No information was given on the roll-out of the security service outside the US.
