When Microsoft rolled out its major Hotmail upgrade last year, one big new feature was Active Views–the ability for Hotmail to do stuff such as as display Hulu videos and Flickr slideshows right in your inbox, as well as identify e-mails with shipping-service tracking numbers in them and show the package’s status. Today the company is announcing some additional Active View capabilities that let Web companies produce e-mails that behave a whole lot like Web pages. The idea, as before, is to let Hotmail users take action on e-mails without having to hop out of Hotmail at all.

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One of Gmail’s best, least high-profile features is the Google Docs Viewer, which does a very solid job of displaying the contents of file attachments without requiring you to download them or have the appropriate application installed. (Its PDF support is so nicely done that I rarely download Acrobat files anymore.) And now Google is adding support for a dozen more formats, from the essential (Excel) to the surprisingly arcane (fonts in TTF format).

The tech-savvy among us know its completely possible to have a single physical email address, yet be able to make it appear as if we have more through the use of an alias. Well, enter Microsoft, which is bringing this to the masses in the form of what it’s calling throwaway e-mail addresses.

Possible uses for this are almost limitless: For example, you can create an alias to give to untrusted web sites, then create a rule to forward all those potential e-mails to a specific folder to keep your inbox unclogged. Got a less than professional e-mail address? Hide it with a much more dignified one.

“The average person maintains three different email addresses,” Windows Live product management director Dharmesh Mehta reported. He added the updates save the user time by allowing one account to appear as many, rather than the need to maintain several disparate accounts.

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I have two Gmail accounts: a personal one and a Google Apps one (at Technologizer.com) which I use for work. The fact that I can’t be logged into both at one time in the same browser is a hassle. I’d hoped today’s introduction of a Gmail feature that lets you grant access to another user (including yourself, at another Gmail account) would fix this. But it turns out you can only let in e-mail accounts at the same domain, so the new feature doesn’t help me. (When I’m on a Mac, I use a program called Mailplane to hop back and forth between the two accounts with one click.)

Google has tweaked Gmail’s interesting, ambitious, and occasionally aggravating Priority Inbox feature. One feature sounds essential: It now explains why it thinks a particular message is important.

Facebook's Andrew Bosworth and Mark Zuckerberg at today's event

I spent this morning at Facebook’s press event. As expected, it involved the transformation of Facebook’s Messages feature into full-blown e-mail–except that Mark Zuckerberg kept saying that the new service isn’t e-mail. Depending on how you look at things, either he’s right or it’s both e-mail and a whole lot more.

I shared some initial details and impressions over at Techland; now I’m sitting back and wondering when I’ll get to try the new service. (Facebook said that it’ll roll out to users over the course of the next few months, but that those of us who were at the event should get it soon; I tried e-mailing myself at harrymccracken@facebook.com, but it got bounced back.)

(Update: My friend Rafe Needleman has a spare invite and says he’ll send it to me. Bless you, Rafe.)

As I tweeted the proceedings, I was somewhat surprised at the (mostly) negative feedback I got from people who were following along at home. Here’s one representative example:

@harrymccracken Sorry, Harry. Bored. Gmail does it all already.—
Shaya L. (@pickleshy) November 15, 2010

I wasn’t trying to egg on the doubters–okay, I admit that I did mention Google Wave in one tweet–and I have an open mind about the whole thing. But one of the things I like about Facebook Messages in their old form was the utter simplicity–no spam, no messages I’d rather not deal with, no Gmail-style feature overload. I concede that I’m not one of the teenagers who Zuck said inspired these changes, but I hope that new Facebook Messages retains the no-nonsense personality of old Facebook Messages. Like Zuck, I don’t want Facebook Messages to turn into e-mail–but I also don’t want it to stop being Facebook Messages…

Monday morning at 10am PT, Facebook is holding a press event in San Francisco. TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid reports that he hears the subject is a full-blown Facebook e-mail service that gives every member an @facebook.com account. Inside Facebook, they supposedly consider it to be a Gmail killer.

If that does turn out to be the news, it’ll confirm a months-old rumor about a Facebook project code-named “Titan.”

I’m always up for an interesting new twist on e-mail, and am intrigued by the idea of an ambitious, brand-new Webmail service–at this point, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail are all hobbled a bit by their sheer venerability and deep roots in traditional ways of doing things. But as I mentioned when “Titan” scuttlebutt first surfaced, I also like the fact that the Facebook inbox isn’t a traditional inbox. It’s simple, nearly spam-free, and focused on communications with people I already know and like.

If “Titan” is real, I hope it doesn’t mess up all the things about Facebook communications that don’t need messing with.

I’ll be at Monday’s event–I’ll tweet highlights as they happen, then report back here once we know the upshot.

I’m constantly searching for new ways to manage tasks, but I’m never going to live in any to-do manager. E-mail is the app I live in–and to be even more specific, what I live in is my inbox. I’m far from alone, and a clever new service called NudgeMail acknowledges that by turning e-mail into a to-do manager. (Or, if you prefer to think of it this way, a to-do manager into e-mail.)

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Hey, I can’t get into either of my Gmail accounts. Looks like I have plenty of company.

Social networks threw the order of the inbox into disarray. Now, a start-up is seeking to encapsulate every interaction–regardless of where it occurs–into a unified search engine.

A private beta of Introspectr launched last Wednesday following its demo at NYC Tech Meetup that Tuesday night. I was there, and liked what I saw.

Introspectr indexes your Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. It also pulls in content from external URLs such as Bit.ly links embedded in Tweets.

Co-founder Simon Murtha-Smith demonstrated finding a lost apple crisp recipe. The recipe was not named; it was simply referred to as “AC” in a message, followed by a URL. Introspectr still managed to locate the recipe.

The idea is not exactly new, but something like Introspectr could become a necessity for those of us who have an active social life. Gmail solved the e-mail search problem, but e-mail only captures a fragment of today’s conversations.

Google’s Buzz was an attempt to pull social networking into Gmail, but from my perspective it was an oddball addition that didn’t fit. Introspectr is what Google’s inbox should behave like today. It’s simple, and it works.

At an event in San Francisco this morning, Microsoft announced something called Office 365. It’s less of a new product or service and more of an attempt to make it easy for businesses of all sizes to offload IT infrastructure and acquire the Microsoft productivity applications and services they want on a pay-as-they-go basis. (It’s the successor to an existing offering called the Business Productivity Office Suite.)

Office 365′s components include Outlook and a hosted version of the Exchange server, a hosted version of the Lync unified communications server, hosted Sharepoint, the Office Web Apps, and the full-blown Office Pro Plus suite in its traditional desktop form. New Web-based tools will aim to make it easy to sign up for 365 and manage its various bits and pieces in one place. The company is beta-testing the service now and plans to fully roll it out next year.

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I suspect that ZDnet’s Christopher Dawson is right: Google decided to let users disable Gmail conversation view in part to make its e-mail service more appealing to great big companies with lots of employees who aren’t used to threaded discussions.

Like me, my friend and former colleague Ed Albro has blogged about Gmail’s new option for shutting off Conversation View. Unlike me, he comes down on the side of conversations. Decisively so. You might even say he’s strident on the topic:

From what I can tell from reading through the complaints on the Gmail forum, people don’t like conversation view because they like to keep their inbox tidy and the threaded approach doesn’t let them kill off individual emails in a conversation. In other words, they want to keep their boss’s original email about the monthly budget, but not Joe’s harangue about people using too many pencils.

[snip]

Another common argument from anti-Conversation View crowd is that all those messages they can’t kill are making their inbox too bulky. Come on people: A basic Gmail account now provides 7.5 GB of storage. Unless your threaded conversations include lots of people attaching high-def video files, those individual messages you can’t kill aren’t making a dent in your overall storage.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have the option to turn off Conversation View – I’m just saying you shouldn’t exercise it.

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It’s been one of Gmail’s defining features since day one. Many people swear by it, and competitors have copied it. But for some of us, it creates more problems than it solves–and now, at long last, we can turn it off.

I speak of Conversation View, which clusters together all the e-mails in a thread, so they occupy only one line in your inbox and you can see the entirety of a discussion in one place. Google is confirming a rumor from June by announcing today that it’s possible to disable conversations, so that messages are displayed discretely in the way that was the norm in the pre-Gmail era. (It sounds like it may take a few days until the option shows up for everybody, and individuals in companies that use the Google Apps version of Gmail will only see the option if their administrators choose to allow the use of pre-release features.)

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I’m still deciding how I feel about Gmail’s Priority Inbox. But it’s good to see some of its functionality migrate to Google’s Gmail app for Android. (Now Google just needs to deal with the absurd fact that Android has one e-mail app for Gmail and another for everything else–each of which has only some of the features you want.)

Is Gmail an e-mail service or a comprehensive receptacle for just about every Web-based service you’ll ever need? This guest post at TechCrunch argues that it should stay focused on getting e-mail right.