14 DAY TRIAL // In an update to Windows Live ID shipped in July 2011, Microsoft overhauled the sign-in experience, dropping the old mechanism which featured multiple user tiles as well as features such as Linked IDs. Obviously, users of Windows Live Hotmail have been impacted directly, with those customers joggling multiple accounts affected the most.
Hotmail users hesitated little before bombarding Microsoft with a barrage of negative criticism over the changes to the Windows Live ID sign-in experience. The same sort of input was provided over the Linked IDs feature that Microsoft had killed off.
For those not familiar with Linked IDs, it was designed so that users could connect multiple Windows Live IDs together. Essentially, the feature was leveraged to centralize multiple Windows Live IDs under a single one, with customers using a single password and username in order to sign-in into multiple Windows Live Hotmail accounts simultaneously, although the content itself was not centralized.
The Windows Live Linked IDs feature was introduced in 2007 with the advent of Windows Live Wave 2, discontinued in July 2011, and now re-enabled, since the software giant appears to have had a change of heart.
Eric Doerr – Group Program Manager, Windows Live Cloud Directory explained that users have alternatives to Linked IDs.
“For some customers – particularly power users – you’ve told us that it’s essential to be able to juggle multiple accounts. Over the last year we’ve added several powerful new ways to do this – specifically aliases and email aggregation (“POP aggregation), on top of existing features like “plus addresses”,” he stated.
“Each of these is a great solution designed to help a different scenario. Aliases and plus addresses are a great way to create unique email addresses – great to manage a particular event (shopping for a car or planning wedding for example) or to manage mail from marketing sites. Email aggregation is a great way to take multiple accounts from different email providers and consolidate them all in your Hotmail inbox.”
Microsoft thought that the new features and capabilities rolled out to Windows Live Hotmail would be sufficient for users to no longer care about multi-account login and Linked IDs. It appears that this wasn’t the case.
“As we have made these changes, we looked at how most people use Linked IDs and found that, for the most part, they were used to solve exactly these problems – managing multiple email addresses and accounts. In our major update last month, one of the things we did is turn off the ability to create new Linked IDs, instead encouraging use of our new features,” Doerr added.
“However it became clear from listening to your feedback that there were many people who used Linked IDs for other reasons, and so we are making a change today to re-enable the creation of Linked IDs.”
Microsoft is re-rolling Linked IDs out by the end of this week, but some customers will be able to use it even earlier.