One way we are evolving Hotmail is to help you do more with your email right from the inbox. Another way is to bring the features you expect from traditional desktop mail experiences into Hotmail. With Internet Explorer 9, we can now tailor Hotmail and deliver application-like experiences on Windows 7.

Most of you know that you can now launch Hotmail just like you launch other Windows applications by pinning Hotmail to your Windows taskbar. To do this, sign in to Hotmail in IE9 and go to your Inbox. Now, drag the Hotmail tab from the address bar in IE down to the taskbar, and drop it there. Once you’ve pinned Hotmail, you can check your email just by clicking the icon – no need to open IE and navigate to a bookmark. Hotmail also uses IE 9’s new jump list feature to let you compose a new email or go straight to your Calendar or Contacts just by right-clicking on the Hotmail icon in the taskbar.

This week, we’ve been working on taking the next step and supporting notifications. Some of you may have seen this in the past few days, and we’re finishing the release of this feature today. This means when you’re signed into Hotmail and you’ve pinned it, we’ll show you a notification of how many new messages have arrived since you last checked your inbox.

This works like the mail tile in Windows Phone: the icon updates to show the count of messages that have been delivered since you last did something in Hotmail, and it clears when you do something in Hotmail like visit your inbox or read a message. So, now I can leave Hotmail open in the background while I do other work, and I can tell at a glance whether I have new mail.

If you’re running Windows 7 and using Hotmail, download Internet Explorer 9 today and try pinning Hotmail to your taskbar – we think you’ll like what you see.

Dick Craddock
Group Program Manager, Hotmail

In the past, you’ve heard us talking about the many different types of email and how this creates an opportunity for us to transform Hotmail in ways that help you do more right in your inbox. Over 90% of all email contains a link to some deeper content that isn’t being surfaced in the email, and we know from our research that for most of these messages, there are a few common responses – viewing a slideshow, playing the video, checking shipping status, or accepting an invitation. To help solve this problem, we created Active Views – a platform that reinvents email by making your inbox more interactive and helping you get tasks completed.

How it works

Our approach to Active Views is to categorize messages by sender and by content. For each type, we identify the most common things people do when they receive the email, and we work to bring this directly into the inbox. In some cases, we transform the message. For example, we can take a series of photo attachments and turn them into a slideshow. In other cases, we enable the email sender or website to bring their experience right into the inbox. We’ve created a sandboxed environment that allows partners to insert dynamic content that is up to date and interactive with common tasks through the use of JavaScript.

Our first step – photos, videos, documents, and shipping updates

First, we focused 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. For those messages, we fetch 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.

In traditional email with just a text link, the percentage of people clicking through is less than 10%. With Active Views, customers are clicking on the video control in about 25% of all email messages with a video. In fact, we’ve served over one billion Active Views for photos, videos, documents, and shipping notifications.

Next up – invitations, updates, coupons, and ratings

Now that we have a great experience for common attachments and links, we’re taking the next steps with invitations, updates, ratings, and deals. More and more services use 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. Now those actions happen right in your inbox, saving clicks and time, thanks to the work of partners like LinkedIn, Posterous, LivingSocial, and Netflix. Here are some more before and after pictures of the Active Views platform at work.

LinkedIn messages become an opportunity to take actions and connect with others without having to leave the inbox:

"At LinkedIn, our mission 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 interact with LinkedIn and now with Hotmail's Active View, we are adding increased functionality and efficiency without ever leaving Hotmail's inbox," said Moses Ting, Design Lead on Communications Products at LinkedIn. "With this interactive email technology, we've eliminated any extra steps normally required for professionals to stay connected via email." You can read more from LinkedIn on their blog.

Posterous is enabling inline commenting directly from an email, and the message is updated when you open it to always show the latest comments.

"At Posterous, we've always believed the email is the best platform to share content. We're pleased to partner with Hotmail to let users go beyond frictionless posting and, for the first time, interact with their Posterous website in real time from their inbox. It just makes sense,” said Sachin Agarwal, founder and CEO of Posterous. “Rather than relying on your readers to visit your site, they can now read the latest comments or add their own comments directly from their inbox.” You can read more from Posterous on their blog.

LivingSocial deals emails are turning 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.

The Active Views platform is an important part of our work to tailor Hotmail to the types of email you get every day. And the best part is that it allows for flexibility for partners while ensuring that you stay in control. We’re excited to see great sites like LivingSocial, Posterous, LinkedIn, Netflix, and others join us in making the experience possible.

Dick Craddock
Group Program Manager, Hotmail

If you’re using Windows Live Essentials on Windows Vista or Windows 7 and have Microsoft Update turned on, you’ll see an optional update this week in all 48 languages where Windows Live Essentials 2011 is available.

After launching Windows Live Essentials 2011 last fall, we’ve been closely watching incoming data, monitoring the quality of service, and listening to the issues you were reporting. This update, called QFE1, primarily addresses the top quality-related issues that impact a large number of our customers. (QFE stands for Quick Fix Engineering.) Specifically:

• In Messenger, we fixed a couple of issues where in some cases you could not re-establish video calls or file sharing activities after losing your network connection. Also, sometimes your status messages and display picture were not synchronizing correctly between PCs, so you’d see a notification that changes made would not be seen on other computers. We also made various performance and stability improvements.
• In Photo Gallery, we made a design change so that geotagging no longer overwrites GPS coordinates in image files.
• We corrected various problems with language translation.

This update to Windows Live Essentials 2011 has been available for download since December 2, 2010. We decided to make this update available through Microsoft Update to bring it to the attention of more of our customers. If you downloaded Windows Live Essentials 2011 prior to December 2^nd or bought a PC with Windows Live Essentials 2011 preinstalled, we recommend that you install this update.

This optional update will download a package that only includes the new changes from the originally released version. You won’t have to go through the entire setup for Windows Live Essentials. You may, however, need to reboot your computer after installation is complete. If you start a new installation, or upgrade to Windows Live Essentials 2011 today, your installation will include QFE1.

You can check to see if you have QFE1 installed by looking at the version number in the About dialog for Messenger or Windows Live Photo Gallery. If your version number is 15.4.3508.1109, you’re running the latest and greatest released build. If you’re running version 15.4.3502.0922, we highly recommend that you install this update.

Thank you for using Windows Live and letting us know what you think of it. Your feedback helps to improve our products and make them better.

Arthur de Haan
Vice President, Windows Live Test and Systems Engineering

Office Web Apps are now available to anyone using Hotmail or SkyDrive in Central and South America. This extends the service to people in 18 more countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

With this release, Office Web Apps are now available worldwide. If you are one of our 360 million Hotmail customers, this makes collaborating easier than ever. And even if you don’t use Hotmail, or haven’t used Office before, now you can try out Office Web Apps on SkyDrive and easily collaborate on Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote documents.

You can get more details on the Office Web Apps team blog.

Dharmesh Mehta
Director, Windows Live Product Management

As Frederic from NewsGrange noted today, the Messenger app snuck up and overtook FarmVille this week as the second most popular app on Facebook in terms of daily active users.

We’ve actually been here before – back in November, Frederic wrote about Messenger holding the number two spot, just behind the ever so popular FarmVille. But Zynga released CityVille in December, and it quickly made it to the number one spot – it’s not easy keeping up with them!

Messenger’s consistently high ranking on the Facebook App Leaderboard for daily active users (DAU) reflects the growing popularity of connecting Facebook to Messenger amongst our customers. Over 22 million people have now connected Facebook to Messenger.

Facebook chat from Messenger and Hotmail is by far the most popular feature of our partnership with Facebook. The number of minutes spent on Facebook chat from Messenger has grown nearly 25% since we made this feature available worldwide in Messenger at the beginning of February (and a few weeks ago, Facebook chat came to Hotmail users worldwide, too). Messenger now powers nearly 4 billion minutes of Facebook chat per month.

But Messenger customers are also posting status updates, and sharing links, photos, and files to Facebook from Messenger, activities that have increased steadily since June 2010 when we started offering this service.

We’re really excited people are seeing the value of connecting Messenger to Facebook.

Now, please excuse me while I go water my crops!

Piero Sierra
Group Program Manager, Windows Live

P.S. In case you missed it, here's where you can connect Messenger to Facebook, with options to chat with Facebook friends on Messenger (and vice versa), share status messages between the two services, and more.