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.
Tag Archives | Posterous
Posterous: A Cool Web Repository
I get e-mails with PowerPoint and other types of files attached. Some are entertaining, but it takes more skill than I have to embed them in my newsletter in such a way that everyone can see them. (Scores of you wrote and said that you couldn’t play the YouTube videos I tried embedding months ago.)
But I’ve just discovered Posterous, a handy site for displaying practically any type of file: PowerPoint presentations, PDFs, Flash games, images, MP3s, documents, and videos in a variety of formats. The beauty of Posterous is that PowerPoint files display as they would if you had a PowerPoint viewer and image collections are automatically available as slide shows.
So far, here’s what I’ve posted to Posterous:
* Two PowerPoint presentations, one with images of unusual aircraft and the other showing a trip on Bolivia’s “Road of Death.”
* Two videos–Darwin Awards Reject numbers one and two.
* A PDF of the Monthly Computer Chronicle newsletter.
* A stack of images that show why our car insurance rates are so high.
I really like Posterous because it’s a free service with no signup to worry about. And there’s no muss or fuss: I just send them an e-mail and attach the file I want you to view. There are other features, such as making a blog private and password protecting it. Read the FAQ for more info.
[This post is excerpted from Steve’s TechBite newsletter. If you liked it, head here to sign up–it’s delivered on Wednesdays to your inbox, and it’s free.]