Some great new Hotmail features out there today. You can learn more about it at the official blog. I like the last bulletpoint.

For years Microsoft Streets and Trips, a boxed retail product, has had the ability to create drive routes, and allow you to create try different routes by using drag and drop.

This feature changed my life. I distinctly remember in 2000, having to use fake waypoints in Yahoo Maps to create alternative routes – in particular, going to SF from Mountain View via 280 required a “stop” in Cupertino.

I notice that Google now has a very similar feature on their site – but with 2 important differences. The drag and drop feature is on their website – and unfortunately maps.live.com doesn’t have that. Even more importantly, the drag and drop recalculates the route in real time. That’s pretty stunning IMHO. Given that just a few years ago, it would take a few seconds to calculate a route from Mountain View to Manhattan, the fact that you can now generate alternative routes in real time during drag is amazing.

Here are a few other Map Ideas that I’ve had – and would love to see developed:

1. Chain store clustering: Today, for lunch, I want to drop by In-n-out, Citibank, Target, and Best Buy. There’s actually a fair number of these around – there’s one Best Buy in nearly every city around here (probably as a result of Prop 13). I’d like my mapping service to be able to figure out which is the most efficient combination of these locations, and generate the best path. For those in Manhattan – imagine a tool that lets you find the best most optimal combination of Duane Reade’s, Starbuck’s, Chase ATMs, and McDonald’s. Wow.

2. Walk Routes: Most sites have drive routes. Walk routes should be easy – just discard one way street information and eliminate highways. This would be useful in Hong Kong, Manhattan, San Francisco, London – and any other walkable places.

3. Parking Finder: You pick an address to that you want to drive to, and it’ll find the nearest parking lot as well. Bonus points: It’ll tell you in real time how many street parking spaces are available.

What map ideas would you like to see?

Why the sudden resurgence of posts lately? Mostly because I’ve been using the latest beta of Windows Live Writer, and I’ve found it really helps blogging easy. I had tried it out when it first came out, but there were some things that bugged me – like how it made pictures really blurry. Things have improved since then, and there’s also a lot more plugins now on Gallery that make Writer even better.

If you haven’t tried it yet, give it a shot.

Windows Live Folders Beta is live. Some of my friends worked on it. 500 megabytes of storage for you for free. Here’s the project’s blog.

Sign up today and start storing your user generated content (ugc) for your community so that you can have a conversation while you’re preparing your podcast on P2P, Ruby on Rails, iPhone, search engine optimization, and Web 3.0.

Ok, that last line was just to stuff a bunch of buzzwords together. Maybe you can find 500 megs of buzzwords to upload or something.

Last week I noticed that the (let’s call it) Foo process at Microsoft was really inefficient and seemingly out of date. That it had dramatic room for improvement.

I sat down, went through the Foo process, documented everything I thought was wrong with it, stuffed it into a PowerPoint deck, and then sent it off to Lisa Brummel, the Senior Vice President of Human Resources.

I got back a well written e-mail a few hours later, clearly written by Lisa herself. It provided some context of how we got into that state, some of the challenges that will occur in changing the Foo process, and a commitment to have the Foo-related team examine the situation to streamline it.

Though Microsoft is a 70,000+ company, it’s good to know that I can still have access to our execs.

On a completely random note, I think the photo from the corporate website (linked above) would’ve been better had it included Lisa’s famous shorts.

7 years ago, a few things happened on June 19th, 2000. Let’s take a look at a few:

1. Microsoft Corp. today announced that the development of the Microsoft® Windows® Millennium Edition (Windows Me) consumer operating system is complete and the product has been released to manufacturing. Windows Me is the latest version of the Microsoft operating system designed specifically for the home user. It improves the home computing experience by delivering enhancements in the areas of PC health, digital media, home networking and the online experience.

Well, WinME wasn’t exactly a giant hit – but it did introduce a great feature: System Restore.

2. Microsoft Corp. today announced it acquired Chicago-based Bungie Software Products Corp., a leading independent developer of action oriented computer and video games. As a result of this acquisition, Microsoft gains exclusive publishing and distribution rights to select Bungie-developed titles, including the highly anticipated sci-fi action epic “Halo.”

Wow, actually I had never known that Bungie was originally Chicago based.In retrospect, that was a pretty good acquisition. I hear that Halo thing is pretty popular.

3. MSFT closed at ~$36.8438.

Stock options can be a great form of compensation – but they can also be a terrible form of compensation since it’s up to the market. In retrospect, it appears I should’ve taken the option to cash out in 2003. For better or for worse, the expiration of my initial grant today closes out this chapter of my life.

4. Dennis T Cheung joins Microsoft, has the picture on the right taken for his badge, and helps ship Microsoft Entourage 2001, Microsoft Entourage X, MSN Explorer for Mac, Microsoft Entourage 2004, Microsoft PowerPoint 2004, Microsoft Entourage 2004 with Lots of Exchange Goodness, MSN Search Toolbar 2.6, Windows Desktop Search 2.6, Windows Live Toolbar 3.0, and Windows Live Hotmail.

It’s been a fun and interesting 7 years. I’ve been given a lot of opportunities for which I have been thankful, and I’ve learned a lot as well. I’ve worked on a lot of cool products, worked and met a lot of interesting people. Let’s see what happens next…

Your mail is here, come and get it!: It’s Here and the Fun Has Only Just Begun
We did it!  Windows Live Hotmail is officially launching worldwide!  This means as early as Monday morning (we’re rolling this out gradually), you can sign up for a new Windows Live Hotmail account and get instant access to our new, world-class email service built from the ground up.

Hurray Windows Live Hotmail has launched! The post linked to above has lots of fun pics, and amazingly I managed to miss every single photo shoot we had due to conflicting meetings. That’s just as fair because I only had a small role in this release having been on the team for just a few months.

Check it out… let me know what you think!

The other day I had some downtime, so I decided to customize the Quick Access Toolbar in Outlook 2007 to improve my efficiency:

Sweet! Now I can flag an email as low importance, flag as high importance, check names in the To/CC fields, switch between plain text and HTML, left justify, center justify, show the BCC field, change the font name/size/color/highlight, and even delete the mail.

How convenient!

Even better, I found out that these customizations are stored on your hard drive as .QAT files! You can find them here:

C:\Users\[your user account]\local settings\Microsoft\Office

Sweet! I went and customized Word, PowerPoint, and Excel as well, copied their QAT files to a FolderShared folder, and then copied the customizations to all my machines.

I feel more productive already.