Windows Live Mail – The emergence of a framework?

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:
  
• The Compose New Mail Page:
  
• The Calendar Page:
  

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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