When Microsoft announced it was rolling out a new, Ajaxified version of its popular Hotmail service, the blogosphere responded with a deafening yawn.
To geeks, bloggers, technophiles and other proponents of Web 2.0's forward-thinking culture, the reason for the cold reception is obvious: Hotmail is a dead duck. If we use webmail at all, it's Gmail or Yahoo all the way. In fact, any web-savvy citizen with a Hotmail address is more than likely only using it as a spam dump.
And yet Microsoft says Hotmail's user base is a massive 280 million. That's a tremendous amount of people who were, until today, living in the past.
For years, they've been using a product that has little or no influence on the web's culture. While the digerati attend conferences and sit on panels about SNS, RSS and P2P, an army of zombies clicks away on antiquated apps. They continue to use old software running on old networks, unwilling or unable to change.
What other services hum away in yesterday's glory, wholly independent of the web of The Now? Where do the zombie armies congregate? What are they using? And why haven't they upgraded?
We've identified a handful in the list below. Suggest an undead app or vote for your favorite.
While you can submit as many as you want, you can only submit one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.
