It seems like I was just blogging about Windows Live Hotmail coming out of beta and it looks like there is already a substantial update to the service being rolled out. From the Windows Live Hotmail team’s blog post entitled August: Hotmail will soon bring you more of your requests, better performance we learn
We went out of beta in May, and we’re already releasing something new. Today, these new features will begin to roll our gradually to all our customers over the next few weeks, so if you don’t immediately see them, be patient, they’re coming!
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More storage! Just when you were wondering how you’d ever fill up 2 or 4 GB of mail, we’ve given you more storage. Free users will get 5 GB and paid users will get 10 GB of Hotmail storage.
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Contacts de-duplication: Do you have five different entries for the same person in your Contacts? Yeah, me too, but not anymore. We’re the first webmail service to roll out “contacts de-duplication”. If you get a message from “Steve Kafka” and click “add contact” but there’s already a Steve Kafka, we’ll let you know and let you add Steve’s other e-mail address to your existing “Steve Kafka” contact entry. We’re just trying to be smarter to make your life easier and faster. There’s also a wizard you can run to clean up your existing duplicate contacts.
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Accepting meeting requests: If you receive a meeting request, such as one sent from Outlook, you can now click “accept” and have it added to your Calendar. This had existed for years in MSN Hotmail, and we’re adding it to Windows Live Hotmail now.
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You can turn off the Today page (if you want to). If you’d rather see your inbox immediately upon login, you have the option to turn off the page of MSN news (called the Today page). The choice is yours.
A nice combination of new features and pet peeves fixed with this release. The contacts duplication issue is particularly annoying and one I’ve wanted to see fixed for quite a while.
So far we’ve seen updates Spaces, SkyDrive, and now Mail within the past month. The summer of Windows Live is on here and so far it’s looking pretty good. I wonder what else Windows Live has up it’s sleeve?