BetaNews reports Microsoft is crunching away on some major renovations in the house of Hotmail. What's new? A cleaner interface, possible integration with Spaces, and automatic inbox refreshing, ala Gmail. Big screenshot here.

Obviously MS is under pressure from Google and Yahoo. As a service, it's been around nearly 10 years. There have been some touchups, even an increase in mailbox size, but what's really changed? People point to spam being worse, but I've got a hotmail account that has NEVER had spam, because I never use it for anything but private, personal emailing.


I still find it interesting that Hotmail doesn't "do more." Microsoft has an amazing potential to leverage their vast empire in the email space. But this begs the question: why bother? So many folks are blogging, IM'ing, using SMS or about a hundred other tools– is there really anything new to offer? I guess we'll know soon.