I use Hotmail to access my liveside.net email at work, and today I was greeted with the notification that Hotmail Wave 3 was active for the account. Just checking now and not all of our accounts have migrated, but kip *at* liveside.net has and also feedback *at* liveside.net:
(btw the LiveSide logo at the top comes from our use of Windows Live Admin Center, which we use to manage our email)
The new interface is definitely fast, but as one of our readers pointed out, not everyone seems happy with the new version. Toph pointed us to two posts on the Windows Live Wire blog that have garnered nearly 2000 comments about the new Hotmail. A quick study show that the reaction is overwhelmingly (and sometimes quite graphically) negative. The earlier post, “Hotmail is Fast, Fast, Fast” is up to 1347 (and counting) comments, and another post, this one actually on “Changes to MSN Groups” is up to 517 as of this writing (many of the comments on the MSN post are complaining about the switch to Multiply.com, but commenters have been piling on there about Hotmail as well).
Many commenters, from a quick scan of the comments, dislike the general interface, but also seem to be unable to get to their folders (an issue, which seems to be fixed, that had to do with larger font settings in Internet Explorer), are quite disappointed (to put it mildly) with the lack of a scrolling feature (mail is shown in sets of 25 at a time, with a pager at the bottom):
Many complaints also center around users’ loss of their Favorites in mail. Apparently this was done to accomodate the use of Favorites across Windows Live:
It’s hard to tell how widespread the dissatisfaction is with the new version: some resistance to change of any kind is to be expected, although 2,000 comments, almost all of them negative, and most of them calling for a return to the “classic” version, are a little hard to ignore. That all these commenters found Windows Live Wire to voice their displeasure is telling.