Active Views were introduced to Hotmail last year to allow links to Flickr, YouTube, and Hulu to be viewed without ever having to leave your inbox. Instead, the content shows up within the e-mail message itself, allowing direct access to videos and slideshows. Today, Microsoft has announced that it is expanding the feature to include mail from LinkedIn, blogging service Posterous, Netflix, and deals site LivingSocial.

In each case, the idea is to allow actions to be taken directly from the Inbox. With LinkedIn, for example, friend requests can be accepted directly within the mail. Posterous—already heavily e-mail-driven—allows blog comments to be viewed and written within Hotmail. Netflix allows movies to be browsed or added to your queue. Perhaps the most compelling, in many ways, is LivingSocial. Instead of sending out a static mailshot to tell you about a deal, the Active View allows the mail to be kept current; if the deal it's telling you about has expired by the time you get round to checking your mail, it will tell you directly, and if the deal is still active, it will tell you how many coupons are left.





The purpose of all of this is to make the inbox itself more powerful. Microsoft claims that over 90 percent of all mail includes a link to other, external content. Often this external content is the entire purpose of the e-mail. Surprisingly, however, the company claims that the click-through rate for these links is low, less than 10 percent. Active Views mean you no longer have to switch away from processing your e-mail, and as a result, Microsoft is claiming much higher levels of engagement: since YouTube and Hulu Active Views were enabled, viewing levels have risen to around 25 percent.





The company is also making efforts to platformize Active Views. At the moment, the technology is restricted to certain partners. Microsoft is planning to open this up so that third-parties can develop their own Active Views. They will still have to work with Microsoft to integrate them—it won't be a free-for-all where anyone can develop an extension to do anything—but it should open the door to a growing number of these integrations. Third parties will also be restricted to adding value to their own mails. This is in contrast to the Flickr, YouTube, and Hulu Active Views, which are enabled for any e-mail.

For users of Hotmail's Web front-end, Active Views are certainly a clever and convenient addition to the e-mail experience, making the inbox a focal point of a wide-range of activities—no longer just a place for e-mailing. Microsoft's broader ambition, however, is to make Hotmail appeal to a wider range of customers, including the kinds of user who switched to Gmail when that first launched. Larger inboxes, improved spam filtering, cleaner advertising, and better presentation of conversations is all part of that objective. With additional bonuses like Active Views, Hotmail may, for many, be a first-rate Web mail solution. Unfortunately for the company, the stigma of old—tiny inboxes, wall-to-wall advertising, and unknowledgeable users—is unlikely to be eradicated by neat new features.