BLOGEVERYWHERE.COM FROM SABEER BHATIA

Sabeer Bhatia floats a new venture blogeverywhere.com

Sabeer Bhatia, founder of Hotmail, has launched a new venture, blogeverywhere.com, that aims to let users comment on any website and enhance the speed of Hotmail e-mail browsing.

Sabeer Bhatia, founder of the Hotmail, has floated a new venture, www.blogeverywhere.com , with former Cisco employee, Shiraz Kanga. Bhatia has invested $5m to develop blogeverywhere over the past two years.

Users of blogeverywhere.com will be able to download an internet-based toolbar that will allow them to publish their own blogs in any website in the world. It will also give Hotmail users faster access to their messages.

The Blogeverywhere toolbar includes two buttons: write and read. The write button opens a small window within the browser where users can add their comments related to the web page visited. The read button allows other visitors to the site to read that message.

Is this likely to succeed? Cut through the noise and hype in the Indian media immediately after the launch, and you can see that it essentially is a toolbar. A toolbar. Get that. 

Now, lets say you download and isntall the toolbar. What do you gain and what do you lose? The answer would be obvious to the reguilar netsurfer, but let us be clear. You lose screen space on your monitor, toolbars are normally considered pests and can potentially be used by the company to pop up advertisements when you don't want to see them and sometimes difficult to uninstall. And worse, till the toolbar becomes popular, its users can visit sites and when they look for existing comments, there would be none, as nobody using a blogeverywhere.com toolbar would have visited or commented till then. So you can be the first to click that 'Write' button and post a comment that nobody would read. Amazing. 

The problem with toolbars is that unless they are ubiquitous, they don't work for such purposes. The international tech media has only cursorily mentioned blogeverywhere. No hype, except in the Indian media. So how can this work? Maybe if a Google or Yahoo or Microsoft thinks that this is a great addition to their existing toolbars, buys the company, and Sabeer Bhatia can exit after pocketing a ncie packet. Blogeverywhere, if just a feature on the Google toolbar, would be a brilliant and succesful tool - you need a bigshot to make it work. Sabeer Bhatia is not that big shot.

Sabeer Bhatia, now a serial technology-entrepreneur, said at a press conference "In the last 10 years, there has been no significant development of technology in Hotmail. Since the last one year, we were thinking of how to increase its speed. The tool we have come up with adresses that problem." There may be no significant developments at Hotmail, but google mail is innovating at high speed that has left Hotmail far behind.

Sabeer Bhatia thinks that the way to rejuvenate hotmail is his Blogeverywhere toolbar. 

Blogeverywhere’s toolbar downloads e-mail messages and stores them in a local cache while the connection is idle. Users will then be able to access unread messages from their computer’s own memory instead of having to download them from the internet. It also allows users to delete e-mail messages from their desktop when they sign out of hotmail.

Mr Bhatia believes the technology will cut down the lag time internet-based e-mail users experience in markets such as India where high-speed internet access is not widely available.

How important is this feature? Not much. Hotmail is not the most-favored web-based email service anymore. It is Gmail and to a lesser extent Yahoo! Mail. Hotmail is not cool anymore. That makes us wonder - is Sabeer Bhatia looking to make another sale to Microsoft - this time blogeverywhere as an extra feature on the MSN toolbar? Time will tell. But before that happens, we shall tell you this - if Sabeer Bhatia tries to do this alone, it would fold up in months. We suspect he knows that.