“Your online world gets better when everything works simply and effortlessly together. That’s the basic idea behind Windows Live.”

So the live.com concept is simply putting all your online services together instead of keeping your mail in one place, your RSS feeds in another place, your favorites somewhere else and so on. But this article is not about the complete suite but Windows Live Mail. If you already have Hotmail – you can upgrade in a few seconds and still keep all your e-mails. Just go to ideas.live.com and click to register.

I already covered Hotmail, so I will only cover the news your get with Windows Live Mail. Please note that live.com is under heavy beta so new features will probably be added every week. Here are the main new features:

• Previews of your messages you can read without leaving your inbox
• Drag-and-drop organization
• Easy importing of your Microsoft Outlook contacts
• One-click control over junk and scam e-mails
• Right-click power—reply, delete, and forward
• 2 GB of storage

Compared to Hotmail – this is way better so I would suggest you change today! But if you’re using Google Apps for your domain, I think it’s just a matter of taste what you prefer.

With that in mind, here’s the main tabs once you login:

The interface is quite “ajaxy”. What you do is add tasks to the tasks tab. You put the description, priority, due date etc. You can also e-mail your tasks to the list:

Then you have projects. Each task can be put to a project. When you create a task you get a list of all your projects once you start writing in the projects box. You can then list the projects and see which tasks are assigned to which project:

Collaboration is possible in two ways, either you can collaborate so you can assign who is responsible for a certain task but you can also make your list viewable to public (or with a password…). Notes is a summary of all notes for all tasks. Deadlines is a summary of all tasks that have a deadline coming up. History is a list of tasks that has been completed.

Then there’s the Dashboard which gives you an overview of everything which you also can customize.

I like Voo2do. It’s playful and easy to use. However, it lacks some functionality like a calendar so you really need some other tool aswell to do the job to replace your “Outlook” or “Moleskin”. However, if you’re looking for a to-do list – check it out!

I would say it’s more of a calendar service. You can share events with other users, import from iCalendar, vCalendar and Outlook. I wouldn’t say the interface break any new ground – it’s pretty basic!

What makes this service stand out is the possible to send reminders via SMS. Only 2 free/day though, but it’s possible to buy more (from 50 SMS for $8 to 500 SMS for $35). So if you’re looking for this – MyMemorizer might be something for you!

The Calendar is pretty basic – you can add Events and the usual information such as reminder, repeats, notes, tags and invites. The To-do list is very simple. You can more or less only tag your entries. The interface is fast and quite “web 2.0″-ish.

30 Boxes also offers a “webtop” – which is a web-based desktop. First it will give you an overview of your calendar, to-do list and search. You can change your desktop’s background and then the important things, add docks. Docks are small “applications” that plugin to your webtop at 30 Boxes. At the moment, the following docks exist:

Those services will open up as a “window” on your webtop. Netvibes, My Yahoo, Personal Google offer you to add feeds and other components to a “personal startpage”. So if you’re a fan of any of these, or use several of them for different purposes – be sure to check out 30 Boxes.

Google Calendar, MySpace and Flickr - I think most of you know of those services.

Meebo lets you run ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, Jabber, JTalk and MSN Messenger over the web! Facebook is a social utility that enables you to share information with your friends. Webshots is a service where you can upload and share photos.

I’m amazed how fast everything is. With a few new docks – this thing will be very useful. I often struggle with the fact I have several different “portals” I have to visit for specific tasks. Keeping them all together – and still use the unique features of each service is a good thought.

Here are some more screenshots of the Webtop when opening upp different services:

But iScrybe really turn heads. It has all the bells and whistles that you need and it does the job more than fine. It but it runs very well and it got some realtime features I haven’t seen on the web before with nifyt little animations and stuff. And best of it all – It works even though I’m offline!

But how does it do in the real-world? Is it usable? You can browse your calendar by year, month, week or day. When you go between the views it will animate the transition which is really cool (see screencast). You can easily add appointments by simply just clicking in the calendar and start writing. When you click an entry you will get the details such as times, notes, reminder sharing etc. You can also categorize your entries with different labels and colors. Speaking of colors – you can more or less style your theme in any color you want.

Reminders will popup and you can decide on Snooze it or dismiss it. You also have a task-list where you easily can add tasks. This list can be filtered on date, status, labels etc. If you need to take action on a certain task at a specific time, you can simply drag’n'drop it into the calendar and it will schedule time for it. This is really good for structured time management people like myself – I work a lot with using the “GTD – Getting Things Done” time management philosophy.

If there’s anyone out there who like to print their calendar, iScrybe offers a great customization for this:

The best way by far is to simple show you the screencast:

This webapp really is what I’ve been waiting for when it comes to user interface. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles when it comes to functionality compared to, for example, locally installed Outlook – but that maybe is a little bit too much to ask. There’s a button called “Upcoming modules” which sounds very interesting. Let’s just hope they keep up the good work!

Thanks for the tip Zoli.

Google GMail Loader (GML) is a free tool that enables you to import your existing mail to GMail. It supports many clients using the mBox format such as Netscape, Mozilla, Thunderbird etc. There’s no support for PST yet, but there’s an application called PST Reader that can convert PST to mBox.

gExodus also an application offering you to import your mBox format mailbox.

Also, here’s a tip how to import your contacts into GMail or simply use the Google Help and do it using an CSV file.

• Don’t have to install ANYTHING
• It’s as powerful and fast as a desktop app
• Zoomable calendar views (this is cool – watch the video)
• Organize your thoughts with bookmarks, web snippets, images and files
• To-do lists integrated with your calendar
• Share and collaborate with friends and co-workers
• Elegant, compact and handy print formats
• Easily work across multiple timezones
• Import and export from other apps easily – I hope they’ll do Outlook so I, at last, can uninstall it ;)

The beta will be available in October, but check this demo out in the meantime. You’ll see some groundbreaking things in the interface that I’m really excited above. I really hope it turns out well:

You can view the calendar by day, week, month, year or as a list. When you create an event you can choose to put it Private or Public, reminders (via email), location, recurring and attendees (which will receive invitation via email).

One nice feature is when you have created an event you can drag’n'drop it between dates. You can also create several different calendars, for example one for work and one for personal. You can import (Outlook, Yahoo Calendar, ICal, and many others), export (CSV, ICS – ICalendar).

You can also share your calendar with other CalendarHub users or publish your calendar which creates a web page that anyone can view and you can subscribe to other user’s calendars.

Check out this Screencast for a good overview of the features:

It works so that you create a “hive”. A Hive is a place where you can post and share information online. A huve can consists of address book entries, custom text fields to add notes, photos and whatever. There are many templates (430 at the moment) available and you can create your own templates aswell from scratch. When you create your own templates you can define what can of data (types) your hive consists of for example a textnote, address book entries, photos or you specify in very much detail what type of data can be added. In other words, everything is very modular. You can more or less specify exactly what you want to add and create templates to suit your needs!

So more or less, it’s a way to keep your notes online and share them with others. Even though it’s very powerful and makes you add cusotmizable pages I kind of think “what do I need it for?”. As far as I’ve seen it lacks the possibility to put reminders and it’s more a replacement for your notes on paper.

However, it’s still in early beta and it’s invite only so it will be interesting to see which kind of features that are added in the future.