Hotmail: "Hey, Baby, Remember Me?"

Lately I’ve been getting the occasional e-mails from MySpace and Friendster, those relics of social networking from a more innocent, Blingee-filled time, asking me to come back to the old hangouts and see what’s new. The notes read like half-hearted booty calls filtered through a marketing department, with the vague dread that the old fun times are dead and buried lurking underneath every extra exclamation point. On that note, today comes news that the folks at Microsoft are on the verge of “reinventing Windows Live Hotmail,” nipping and tucking the old webmail service in hopes that they can lure back those people who were enticed by Gmail’s somewhat sleeker pastures. The new Hotmail knows how to flatter, too; it’s now calling itself “the most efficient email for busy people,” because it knows that even though you might have a crazy life, it’s here for you. It’ll even get rid of all that “inbox clutter” (those e-mails that aren’t technically spam, but are pretty much useless) so you can focus on the important things — like, you know, the banner ads running along the side of your inbox. [Via]