Breaking Up With Hotmail

Jack Shafer pens a Dear John letter:

I have never been embarrassed to have a Hotmail addresssomething I can't say about my AOL account. In fact, I wouldn't be writing this today if Hotmail had stuck to being Hotmail. But no, these days it wants to stand between me and the entire Web, monitoring my every step. When I sign on to collect Hotmail, it immediately starts hectoring me to connect my account to Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. It implores me to "Share something new" with people in my network. It begs me to upload photos. Right now, the opening page of Hotmail is alerting me to the upcoming birthday of somebody I don't even know.