Hotmail Goes Interactive

If you’ve been around on the internet for any period of time the name Hotmail must have been brought up a couple times. This Microsoft free mail service has been lurking in the shadows and slowly updating its platform. Today though Hotmail goes interactive with JavaScript enabled e-mail.

This new interactivity allows developers to embed and run JavaScript programs from within e-mails. Furthering the evolution from HTML e-mails to new heights Hotmail is opening the doors for the evolution to take a huge step forward.

For the end-user this means that their incoming e-mails will be fully interactive and increasingly up-to-date with information that you want to see in your inbox.

If developers send an e-mail with Hotmail’s new changes, you’ll be able to interact with it and take actions within the e-mail itself. Basically, the new Hotmail e-mails will look, feel and behave like a web page.

This cool blingy update has potential to keep Hotmail competitive with Google’s Gmail. Going head to head with Google’s GMail is a tough thing, even when GMail has a slight upper hand, enabling previews from Flickr and YouTube within e-mails.

However, JavaScript in e-mails can be a big security hazard. Malicious code is a top risk with this new update from Hotmail. Windows Live Active Views is our answer. Microsoft has been pretty secretive with Windows Live Active Views workings but what we’ve found out is that e-mails will be able to run securely within Hotmail. We realize that is a pretty vague statement, but that is all we’ve been able to learn.

The pioneering companies to utilize this new technology will be Orbitz and Monster.com , with LinkedIn and Netflix coming soon.