One such feature now available in the revamped email server is ‘instant actions,’ a tiny little change that might actually save you a lot of time in the long run. Instant Actions provides you with customizable icons that show up when you hover over each email, allowing you to do things like move or delete a message with one quick click.

Why The New Hotmail is So Exciting:

It is fascinating to watch Microsoft not only catch up and make its own versions of handy Gmail features for Hotmail, but also come up with things Google has yet to think of. Microsoft is trying to bust Hotmail out of its funk and make it a worthy, modern, relevant email server once again, an effort they deserve at least a pat on the back for.

When the changes role out in a few weeks, dust off your Hotmail account and take a peek inside—you might just like what you find.

But maybe, just maybe, you should consider revisiting your good old Hotmail account soon, because it is finally changing. Within weeks Hotmail will be rolling out a set of shiny new features. The changes are long overdue but it seems Microsoft has finally decided it will attempt to give Gmail a run for its money.

What’s New in Hotmail:

One significant improvement of the new system is the inclusion of categories, much like in Gmail.

Hotmail users can now label messages or senders into a particular group, either automatically based on content or sender, or manually. Users can also ‘flag’ messages, which automatically moves them to the top of your inbox and marks them with a little flag, much like Gmail’s ‘star’ system. Hotmail will also now automatically recognize newsletters and put them into a separate folder.

What’s Different from Gmail:

One totally unique and very welcome feature of the new Hotmail is the ‘scheduled cleanup.’ Scheduled Cleanups allow you to move or trash messages from specific senders after a set time period. You want all those irritating Facebook notification emails to be automatically trashed every three days? No problem. You want your banking statements to magically appear in their own folder at the end of every week? Done. It might not sound very exciting but the scheduled cleanup is actually a refreshing and much needed tool that allows you to easily keep your inbox neat and tidy.

But Google has taken extra steps to add value, enabling group video chat through a ‘hangout’ section, and by identifying topics users might be interested in with a ‘sparks’ page – a front-end to Google Search.

The service is also integrated with Google’s Profiles, Buzz and Gmail functions, so it’s simple to roll in any existing social connections. Users will notice a new Google+ panel in the upper-right-hand-side of any Google page after logging in.

In a strategy that worked wonderfully for Google’s Gmail offering, Google+ is currently invite-only, so you may have to wait for access to trickle down through your best-connected friends and colleagues.

Until then, Google+ is definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Google+, launched just a year after the tech behemoth’s first, widely criticized foray into social media, Google Buzz, is also full-frontal attack on social networking heavyweight, Facebook. Google is making a real attempt to build on the perceived weaknesses of existing networks.

Privacy is Key

The big battleground will be privacy. Facebook has come under increasing scrutiny for defaulting to the loosest security settings – Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg famously claimed that privacy is dead in the social networking age – and Google Buzz, too, came under fire for taking insufficient account of security concerns.

In response, Google+, which is currently still in “field-testing” phase, allows users to separate their network of contacts, or ‘connections’, into invisible ‘circles’, so users can control who gets to see what information. Connections can easily be swapped between groups – colleagues, friends or family, for instance – by dragging and dropping, which could be a big plus for Facebookers frustrated at the daunting prospect of sorting their giant network of friends into new groups after the fact.

Like Facebook, Google+ allows users to send messages to one another, via browser or smartphone, and upload image and video albums. Notifications and posts are displayed in a familiar-looking news feed, or ‘stream’. And instead of ‘liking’ a post, Google+ users can hit a ‘+1’ button.

Stay tuned next week for more on Google+!

The Chromebook, a “thin-client” laptop currently being built by Acer and Samsung, is designed as a leaner, more cost-effective alternative to the traditional laptop, which relies on a large hard drive full of software. All you need for a functional Chromebook is an internet connection.

The netbooks, which retail for between $349 and $499, shun Microsoft’s dominant Windows OS and its lucrative Office suite – including the popular Word, Powerpoint and Excel programs.  Instead, the Chromebook comes loaded with ChromeOS, which only runs a browser and associated programs – its tiny 16BG SSD storage doesn’t leave room for much else.

Cloud Capabilities

It’s designed for users to run everything through the Chrome browser, with all office work done online through existing apps such as Google Docs. Documents are then stored online, in the cloud. And that’s where you see some of the real benefits.

Cloud-based storage means you never have to worry about losing the laptop itself — it’s simply a way of accessing your information online. You could access and edit those same documents from a replacement Chromebook, or any other computer with an Internet connection. If you trust your cloud host, you never need to worry about losing data again.

Check back next week for more on Google’s Chromebook and ChromeOS.