Microsoft's Hotmail web email service celebrated its 15 anniversary yesterday--few remember, but the service was originally called HoTMaiL because those capitalized letters form HTML, the web's markup language--but instead of a massive retrospective--which I have to say I'd appreciate--the company is instead looking back over the past year.
You can read more about that on the Inside Windows Live blog: Certainly, there have been a lot of nice changes over the past 12 months. And if that's not good enough, be sure to check out Wikipedia's Hotmail entry, which includes more information about Hotmail's entire history.
But I'm more intrigued by some info in there about some small but useful changes that are just starting to roll out:
Mini-calendar. Microsoft is adding a mini-calendar, similar to the one in Outlook, to the left pane of Hotmail "so you can quickly see upcoming appointments and jump to a particular date." It's in trial now and will be turned on for all users soon.
Go to. To help find particular emails, Microsoft is adding a "go to" option to Hotmail that "lets you easily get to messages from a particular date by clicking 'go to' at the bottom of your message list."