On Seth Godin’s FaceBook’s Hotmail problem: I remember vividly registering my then-truly-unique nickname like crazy on all available services. Also, I remember the only one real problem with Microsoft’s Hotmail – way too many ads. I used to have that huge 17″ monitor, and yes, it was considered a big deal to have 17″ monitor with 1280 by 1024 resolution, most people had 15-inchers with 800 by 600 or 1024 by 768 resolutions. So whenever I opened IE or Netscape with Hotmail page my eyes started to hurt with all the blinking, flashing, dizzying advertisements. That’s why I stopped using Hotmail at all, other then for registrations (read: spam collection account).
Same story was with Yahoo, but they were much more gentle. As with Hotmail – to these days I strongly resist opening Hotmail with anything but Firefox with AdBlock Pro.