Taking much less time in beta than Gmail, Microsoft's Outlook.com e-mail service has been stripped of its preview label and is now suitable for and open to all.
During its preview, Microsoft claims some 60 million users signed up. That number will grow enormously in coming months, as Microsoft will now begin migrating hundreds of millions of Hotmail users to the new user interface. The company claims the service will scale to a billion users.
Microsoft is also trumpeting Outlook.com's integration with SkyDrive, saying nearly half of Outlook.com's users have taken advantage of SkyDrive to share half a billion documents and photos.
The company is also extolling the virtues of the service's social networking integration. Outlook.com can show updates from LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook directly within the mail front-end. in addition to helping people keep up to date with their contacts, this also means they see fewer ads than they saw in Hotmail.com; the portion of the interface that's used to show ads is also used to show social networking information.
To go with the live launch, Microsoft has some new ads showing off Outlook.com (and before that, Hotmail.com) features designed to make it easier to manage newsletters, mailing lists, and all of the other not-quite-spam, not-quite-ham that many of our inboxes are filled with.
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