It’s official! Microsoft have just announced that Hotmail is getting a new design and some impressive upgrades!

www.hotmailpreview.com

Wow! Go to the preview website, and also read the announcement, this is good stuff. Hurry up and launch the new Hotmail please! Best of all, Hotmail will now be fully integrated with SkyDrive! This will be really useful. Every time I send or download an attachment in a Hotmail email, I feel there should be a SkyDrive button to go with it.

SkyDrive is rapidly becoming by far the most useful online storage facility, thanks to the new Hotmail, the new Office Live, and of course Office 2010 — all of which are integrated with SkyDrive and able to use this as their file storage system. SkyDrive is becoming my new hard drive – it has everything! (MS’s domination of the market with MS Office gives them an advantage that Google can only dream of. Google are planning to integrate their web-based office apps with their web-based storage, but they have taken too long, and besides the number of people using Google’s desktop publishing apps is negligible compared to MS Office and Windows.)

Here’s my wish-list of the features I want added to SkyDrive… If MS can give us these features, it would make SkyDrive absolutely perfect!

  • The ability to upload bigger files (up to 5 GB would be nice)
  • The ability to link directly to files on SkyDrive (by providing a permanent URL for a file on SkyDrive)
  • A public API for SkyDrive (in fact, there already is an API, but we need it to be made public please!)