Think of StrawberryJ.am as an automated curator of stories in your social stream. Its algorithm finds what the people you are following are tweeting about them presents them to the user in a manner reminiscent of Reddit or Digg, though combined with the social graph, the way XYDO does. You can then load those stories into your Buffer queue and they will be tweeted throughout the day. StrawberryJ.am is offering beta invites to ReadWriteWeb readers. Check after the jump for information.

StrawberryJ.am and Buffer are complimentary pieces in the puzzle of a curated Web. StrawberryJ.am surfaces content using your social stream and Buffer helps you spread tweets linking to it throughout the day. The companies make perfect foils to each other. See the announcement on Buffer's blog for details on how the two will integrate together.

Strength In Numbers Against the Competition

The startups will need to find some strength in each other because the curation and tweet-scheduling landscape is crowded. Outside of normal news readers like Feedly and Google News, StrawberryJ.am must contend with the likes of iPad applications Zite and Flipboard that use semantic social data to uncover content. Then there are Digg (yes, it still exists) and Reddit, Summify and XYDO in the space. Buffer competes against popular platforms like TweetDeck, Seesmic and Hootsuite along with tweet schedulers like Twuffer, Later Bro, Twaitter, Future Tweets and Tweetsqueue.

We wrote about Buffer when it launched a few months ago. Directly after our post went up, Buffer was contacted by Ryan Sarver, the director of platform at Twitter. Sarver said that Buffer was among the apps that third-party developers should be creating, (which was covered by The Next Web). For a startup with two founders under the age of 24, that was good news. Buffer was then contacted by reputation ranker Klout for possible collaboration and now it is partnering with other startups. Things are looking up for founders Joel Gascoigne and Leo Widrich.

As a special offering for ReadWriteWeb, if you sign up for the public beta of StrawberryJ.am on Friday you will be approved on Saturday June 11 with up to 500 invites.

With Microsoft's initiatives in the area of HTML5 (the next major revision of the Web's core markup language), including its HTML5-enabled version of Bing search, and updates to Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 Web browser, it wouldn't be surprising to hear that Microsoft is indeed working on an HTML5-enabled Hotmail Web application, too. But will Microsoft actually release it before Google does the same for Gmail? That could make things interesting.

In February 2010, Google announced it was shifting all its Google Gears-related efforts to HTML5. Gears, an internally built Web browser plugin, brought offline storage capabilities to a number of Google services, including Gmail, Docs, YouTube, Reader and others. In April 2010, Google announced it would discontinue offline access in Google Docs provided by Gears in favor of HTML5. The transition would be "temporary" Google said. In December, Google announced Docs would have finally HTML5-enabled offline storage once again in "early 2011."

It is now April 2011, and there is still no offline functionality in either Gmail or Docs. According to a post from a Google employee at the beginning of this month on an official Google support forum, the company says it mis-estimated the timeline for the change in Docs.

"Hi all,

We're sorry we mis-estimated the timeline for when we'd have offline functionality again. While we try to provide accurate information around when features will be released, in some instances we can be wrong in guessing how long it'll take to build something. Morever, it's more important for us to launch with as few bugs as possible, which can only happen after much testing and iteration.

Rest assured that our engineering team is working hard to bring offline back. Hope you'll stick around and be patient with us for a bit longer."

Small Advances in HTML5 via Mobile and More

That's not to say HTML5 developments have stalled at Google. It has rolled out HTML5-enabled mobile apps, select features and notifications for Gmail, plus HTML5-enabled cloud printing support for mobile users of Docs. It has just not launched offline storage yet.

Meanwhile, although Microsoft never offered any form of offline storage for Hotmail, it has been publicly touting its HTML5 advances recently, including an HTML5 version of Bing search, an HTML5-enabled smartphone experience and HTML5 support in IE9.

Of course, Microsoft's version of HTML5 support for IE may not be the same one the rest of the online community believes in, as ZDNet points out, referencing Firefox's Mike Beltzner's comment skewering Microsoft for Microsoft for describing HTML5 as a "native experience" that works best on Windows. (Oh Microsoft, will you never learn?)

That said, Microsoft at least seems to be making more noise about the HTML5 Web standard in its products these days, while Google is now on record saying it goofed on the timeline for bringing HTML5 to one of its Web services.

With that in mind, let's declare the race to bring us HTML5-enabled offline storage to webmail officially on. Anyone want to take bets on who gets there first?

Whenever I'm checking my email, one of two things can happen. I get an email, click on a link, and 20 minutes later I'm not sure how I ended up on Facebook but yes, I would love to attend a dinner party next Thursday. If I'm truly task-focused, however, I'll at the very least end up with a screen full of so many new tabs that I forget which tab I'm on in the first place. Either way, email can set me off on a confusing and messy adventure and Microsoft has an answer I'd love to see become a standard.

Today at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Microsoft is announcing a new type of interactive email that keeps you focused on getting through your email while still being able to look at pictures, watch videos, accept friend requests and more.

Last December, the company started helping users with these sorts of emails with something called Active Views. Active Views would take links in your inbox and turn them into embedded content. That way the YouTube link your friend sent isn't just a jumbled collection of characters, it's that video of the cat falling of the table. Or whatever. Whatever the video, you could experience it directly from within your email, rather than opening a new browser tab.

Since December, Microsoft says Hotmail has served up more than 1 billion links in this fashion. That number is about to grow drastically.

The company is announcing a round of new partnerships today. Within these emails, users will be able to immediately respond to connection requests on LinkedIn, add movies to their queue on Netflix, see deals that are active when they open their email rather than old expired ones on LivingSocial and even comment directly on posts sent to them from Posterous.

The feature works by allowing partner companies send emails with embedded JavaScript functionality, which Hotmail then runs in a fully sandboxed (and therefor secure) environment. Currently, the feature only works on the webmail version of Hotmail, not on mobile or in an email client, but external functionality could come in the future. Will we see this become a standard that's used across email clients? Mehta says that, "the notion is that this will move to a standard at some point. We don't generally throw out a standard and see if people will come."

We asked if we would see Facebook added to this list in the near future and while Mehta said Microsoft didn't have anything to announce on that front at this time, we expect that those Facebook friend requests and event invites aren't far off. After all, 16% of all email in Hotmail is a Facebook notification of some sort.

Hotmail may have three times as many users as Twitter, but it's looking for something that may not be as easily quantifiable - the cool factor of  Google's Gmail. That's something that Microsoft has been working on for a while now, with a full redesign of its email client last year.

Today, the company announced that it's adding another bit of cool to its 350 million member email system - full chatting capabilities with Facebook's 600 million member network worldwide.

"While Gmail beat us to bringing their own chat into the inbox," writes Craddock, "we have now gone a step further and brought both our own chat and Facebook chat into your inbox."

Take that Gmail.

Being serious, though, most integrations like this have one exciting thing in common - they're good for the end-user. The feature lets users on both ends - those logged into Facebook and those on Hotmail - communicate seamlessly with each other. Gmail only has Gtalk and no Facebook.

According to Craddock, the response to the feature has been good since it was first announced last September.

"Since announcing the availability of Facebook chat in Messenger worldwide two weeks ago, nearly 2.5 more million people connected their Facebook accounts to Windows Live, bringing the total to over 20 million customers," writes Craddock. "And with three out of four Hotmail customers using Facebook, we expect that many more people will want to take advantage of this feature, now that it's available from your Hotmail inbox."

If  you're a Hotmail user and haven't yet tried out the feature, all you need to do is connect your Facebook account to Windows Live and check the box for "Chat with my Facebook friends in Messenger."

Wouldn't it be great if you could have one email address for all your friends, one email address you use to sign up for potentially spammy services and sites you don't really want to get in touch with you, another for business and then one more for all your gamer friends?

That's exactly the idea behind the new aliases feature announced this afternoon for Microsoft Hotmail's 350 million users.

The email address a person uses is a big part of their online identity. The average person maintains three different email addresses in order to organize different types of email, maintain different personas, or keep junk mail away from a primary email address. So there are many good reasons that people want multiple email addresses, but maintaining multiple accounts, with different user names and passwords that require you to check multiple inboxes, is inefficient.

Mehta offers the example of searching for a car. You may have to sign up for several sites, but once you've found the car, you now have all this email still coming. With aliases, you can simply turn off the alias and - voilà ! - the emails stop.

As you can see in the screenshot, when you set up the alias, you are also given the chance to direct all that alias's email to a specific directory. This makes it simple to keep email separated so you can easily ignore pay attention to what's important.

It looks really good these days, too. It's fast, it's really clean looking, it has cool features that Gmail doesn't have. It's worth a look. Your friends might make fun of you if they find out you're using Hotmail, but who really needs friends like that, anyway?

I'm impressed by the inbox links to view emails that contain documents or links to documents, a filter for just messages from your trusted content and a filter that automatically pulls aside maintenance messages from social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The integration of Microsoft's online document creation and collaboration tools are really nice too. It's more tightly integrated that Gmail and Google Docs are.

Ads? There are more ads per page in Gmail than in Hotmail, though it's text ads vs graphic ads. You know what else looks quite good? Hotmail on an iPhone. I'm not kidding. It looks really nice. There's a drop down button next to every email in your mobile web inbox that lets you preview the first 3 lines of an email.

I just thought I'd let you know. 350 million people, that's 70% as many as use Facebook you'll note, now have access to a newer, faster, more powerful version of their webmail service.

As Walter Harp, Microsoft's director of product management with Windows Live, told us earlier today, this redesign of Hotmail evolved as Microsoft started to think about how email has changed over the last few years. According to Harp, the last major revolution in email was the arrival of Gmail in 2004. Since then, however, the way people use email has changed. Social network updates from sites like Facebook and LinkedIn now make up somewhere between 15 to 30% of all mail in Hotmail users' inboxes. In addition, email users now send out billions of photos and documents. Microsoft alone stores over 15 billion office documents on Hotmail and its users send out close to 1.5 billion photos every month.

Bigger Attachments - Integration with Office Web Apps

Today's update tackles these changes head-on. Hotmail users will now, for example, be able to send up to 10 GB of photos and documents in a single message. Instead of sending these messages as attachments, however, Hotmail will simply route these files to the sender's Windows Live SkyDrive account (Microsoft's free online storage service), where the recipients can access them through a link. Thanks to the new Office Web Apps, recipients will also be able to see and edit Office documents right in the browser.

Less Clutter in Your Mailbox

In order to make it easier for users to wade through lots of social network status updates and unclutter their Hotmail inbox, Microsoft is introducing a new feature called "1-click filters." These filters will allow users to just see messages from services like Facebook and shipping updates from the USPS.

Other new features that will help to keep Hotmail users' inboxes organized include a new Gmail-like conversations view (which will be an opt-in feature and turned off by default), as well as the ability to quickly see all the emails from a given sender while reading an email from this sender. Hotmail users will also be able to just see all the new emails that contain photos.

Microsoft has also partnered with a number of third-party services, including Hulu, YouTube, JustinTV, the USPS, SmugMug and Flickr to provide additional functionality through a feature called "active views." This allows Microsoft to integrate some of the functionality of these sites directly into the emails.

Other new features include Exchange ActiveSync push email for Hotmail - which means that you can now push Hotmail email and data from your Windows Live Calendar directly to the iPhone, for example - as well as a unified contact list for all Windows Live services and third-party services like Facebook and MySpace.

Improved Security

On the security front, Microsoft is introducing full-session SSL encryption for all accounts and a feature that will identify and highlight trusted senders (like known banks and online stores) in order to prevent phishing scams. Microsoft has also managed to bring down the average number of spam emails in its users' inboxes to only 4% (down from 35% in 2006).

Another nifty new security feature is the introduction of a single-use code that allows users to log in from a public computer at an airport or coffee shop without having to fear that their passwords could be stolen. Users will receive these codes by SMS or through an alternate email account.

Microsoft Wants to be #1 in the U.S.

As Walter Harp pointed out when we talked to him today, Hotmail is the #1 email service in the world, but in the U.S., it is currently only the second-most used service after Yahoo Mail. With this new version of Hotmail, Microsoft hopes to be able to close this gap. Email, of course, tends to be a very sticky service and users aren't likely to abandon Yahoo for Hotmail anytime soon. Thanks to today's updates, however, chances are that many new users will choose Hotmail over Yahoo.

In terms of functionality, however, the real competition for Hotmail isn't Yahoo but Google. Google, after all, also offers integration with its online office suite and photo service. Unlike Google, however, Microsoft doesn't plan to offer a small business version of Hotmail and prefers to steer people towards Microsoft Exchange and Outlook instead. Microsoft's services - and especially the Office Web Apps - are competitive with Google's services (and, in many respects, better). Thanks to the integration with SkyDrive and Office Web Apps, Hotmail now presents a very viable alternative to Gmail and it will be interesting to see if Microsoft will be able to capitalize on this.

In the latter parts of the study, the company looked specifically at social network membership data for users of the AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services. Not surprisingly, the study found that Facebook was the most popular network across the board. What's more interesting is how well MySpace fared in some cases. On both the Hotmail and Yahoo webmail services, Facebook only had a small lead. Here, around 20% of all Hotmail and Yahoo webmail users were found to be on Facebook and MySpace. What does this reveal about the Hotmail and Yahoo user base? That they're a little more behind the times? Or that they've been around on the net longer and at one time had created (and possibly now abandoned) their MySpace pages? Unfortunately, the study can't provide us with these sorts of answers.

The study also showed that Twitter is far more popular among Gmail users than anyone else. In fact, on the other services, it's 4-5 times less popular than Facebook. We would like to think that's because Gmail users are just more web-savvy and cool, but it's possible that it's because they're just younger than everyone else.

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn is the least popular social network, but as Rapleaf points out, many LinkedIn users may have registered with their business email instead.

Participation Levels - Hotmail Users have Most Profiles, Gmail Users Better-Connected

When it comes to how the webmail users participate on social networks, Rapleaf found that the majority of the users have only one social media profile. But the service where the average number of profiles is the highest might surprise you - it's Hotmail. There the average is 2.5 profiles per user. Hotmail is followed by Yahoo, then AOL, and it's Gmail users who have the least number of social media profiles. That finding seems odd considering that Gmail users are younger and more likely to use Twitter in addition to Facebook. In fact, it almost seems like this data doesn't even fit with the rest of the study.

However, the discovery that Gmail users are better-connected than the other users makes more sense. On average, Gmail users have the most friends on social networks with 46.2 friends while Yahoo users have the least with 40.0.

Since again, Gmail users tend to be younger than the rest, it goes to reason that they would be in a demographic where their peers are more likely to have social membership profiles. Older webmail users, meanwhile, are still signing up for these sites. Although baby boomers and other middle-aged folks are joining sites like Facebook in droves these days, social networks are still dominated by the young.

Methodology

For the Rapleaf study, the company sampled 120,000 webmail accounts from users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com and @yahoo.com email addresses. They then looked into the users' age, gender and social networking data by collecting information from public social media profiles. Obviously, in doing so, they've skewed their findings a bit, as the company notes in their original blog post. However, the sample size is large enough to form some conclusions about the members of these services, even if it relied on a particular subset of users.

Rapleaf says that despite their collection methods, their findings can offer insight into these different userbases. To some extent, that may be true, but we're left wondering how different these findings would be if they hadn't relied on public social media data and rather went with a true random sample.

Gmail Skews Young, AOL Older

That being said, here's what Rapleaf came up with. In terms of age:

It's not all that surprising that Gmail users tend to be young. After all, the service was established years after AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo. Some of those who already had webmail accounts on other services were hesitant to switch at first (and some still are) since the process of changing email accounts is never entirely painless and often leads to months of checking dual inboxes for emails that may have been missed. Instead, Google's growth likely came from more webmail first-timers looking to set up their brand-new online accounts in addition to the braver "email switchers," a group that also probably skews younger...especially since an effective switchover often requires a bit of technical savvy involving setting up forwarding, auto-responders, etc.

As for AOL being comprised of older users, that too, is relatively unsurprising. Where Google is the newest service, AOL is one of the oldest. Its core user base has aged with it over the years and those who haven't jumped shipped yet are bound to be the older members who don't stay as current with changing technology trends. Still, setting the bar for "old" at 36 is a little humbling - especially for those of us getting up in our years. (That's not old, is it?) It would be interesting to see further breakdowns of this demographic into age segments including 40+, 50+, and so on, but that data was not available.

Gmail Has More Females, Hotmail Has More Males

Perhaps more interesting is the gender variations between the services. Gmail, for instance, includes more females (53%) than males (47%). If those were election poll results, we would call it "too close to call," but in terms of tens of thousands of users, these percentage point differences have meaning.

Why would Gmail attract more females? And conversely, why does Hotmail have more males? (It's 57% male.) Is there something about the aesthetics, workflow or features in those services that appeal more to women than men or vice versa? And if so, what? Unfortunately, raw data can't provide these sorts of answers, but they're definitely intriguing to us. We would imagine they are intriguing to the user interface designers and engineers behind the products, too.

Do women like Gmail's drag-and-drop features or its themes? Do men prefer Hotmail's efficient "quick adds" which allow for one-click additions of Bing content to messages? We doubt those are the reasons for the discrepancy, but it makes us wonder what are. Try as we might, we can't come up with an easy theory to explain this. (If you can, please share in the comments.)

Future details about the study will focus on other data including online activity, friend counts, and social network memberships. Stay tuned to Rapleaf's site for more information.

In yesterday's attack, the list of comprised Hotmail accounts were limited to those where the usernames started with the letter "A" or "B." However, that seemed to imply that the posted portion might actually be a part of a bigger list containing even more login/password combinations. At the time, a Microsoft spokesperson said that the company determined "this was not a breach of internal Microsoft data and initiated our standard process of working to help customers regain control of their accounts." Instead, claimed the spokesperson, those users whose credentials were revealed were likely to be victims of an online phishing attack where a third-party website was involved.

Phishing attacks are typically carried out via email messages where the attacker tricks the recipient into revealing their username and password by pretending to be some sort of trustworthy entity such as the user's bank, IT administrator, a popular website, or an online service. In the case of the stolen Hotmail passwords, it's possible that the attacker sent emails which claimed to be from the end user's email provider. If the user then followed the link contained within the malicious email, they would have ended up not on the actual email provider's site, but on a third-party site whose sole purpose was to capture their username and password when entered.

Beyond Hotmail: More Webmail Providers Affected

According to a story in today's BBC News, the most recent list of compromised accounts, which includes login credentials for Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, and Comcast users, contains some accounts that appear to be old, unused, or fake. However, many others listed are, in fact, genuine.

There's no way to be sure at this point that the new list is a part of the same phishing attack as yesterday's or if it's a new and separate scam.

The website where the accounts were posted - pastebin.com - is now "down for maintenance." Visitors to the site today will receive a message that reads:

Pastebin.com is getting an unprecedented amount of traffic due to a news story in which some leaked Hotmail passwords have been pasted on this site

Pastebin.com was intended as a tool to aid software developers, not for distributing this sort of material. Filters have been put in place to prevent reoccurrence, but the current traffic level is unsustainable.

Pastebin.com is just a fun side project for me, and today it's not fun. It will remain offline all day while I make some further modifications

Paul Dixon

Regardless of whether or not you think your account was compromised, today would be a good day to change the password on whichever webmail service you currently use. Better safe than sorry!

Windows Live users will also soon be able to aggregate updates from MySpace, though according to Microsoft, this integration is still a few months off.

Just like before, your friends will be able to see your updates from these services on their Windows Live home pages, though your friends can also opt-out of your updates, or updates from select services. If you are a prolific digger, for example, your friends can choose not to see an update for every single story you dugg.

If you have a Windows Live account, this link will take you to a page with all the new web activities you can now import. As usual, Microsoft is rolling these updates out slowly, so your account may not feature these new services just yet.

Functionally, the biggest update to Windows Live is that users can now easily invite friends on other social networks into their Windows Live network (and vice versa).

Web IM for Hotmail

In addition, Microsoft also released Web IM for Hotmail today in a number of countries, including the U.S., Canada, Germany, and Brazil.

Looks Like This Strategy is Working for Windows Live

In many ways, this update makes Windows Live into even more of a mainstream version of the current non-beta, non-real-time version of FriendFeed. You can easily aggregate most of your online activity and your friends can easily follow all of your updates on their Windows Live accounts.

According to both Compete and Quantcast, Windows Live has seen its traffic grow rapidly since it updated its services last November, and the addition of these new web activities will surely not hurt the site's traffic.