Outlook.com replaces Hotmail as Microsoft’s webmail service

On February 19, Microsoft announced that Outlook.com is no longer in beta and that it will be replacing Hotmail as the company’s webmail service.

Originally called MSN Hotmail, Microsoft’s older webmail service has been online since 1997. Last year, July 2012, the company released a beta version of Outlook webmail which was then foreseen to replace Hotmail anytime soon.

In the announcement, Microsoft said that they are moving all active Hotmail accounts to Outlook.com. However, Hotmail users will still be able to use the same Hotmail.com domain email address. The upgrade to Outlook.com will provide Hotmail users the same experience as that of new Outlook.com accounts as the new user interface as well as all the new features of Outlook.com will be available to them as well.

With Outlook.com, it lets you merge your contacts with social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. You may also integrate your other webmail services such as Gmail and Yahoo! mail.

When it comes to ads, Microsoft assured that it won’t do similar ad campaign as that of Google’s Gmail where ads are based from scanned words from your inbox. Outlook.com, on the other hand, will provide ads but will be based on demographic information that users provide when they sign up through the service. 

This post was first published at KabayanTech.