Reading through Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite Blog last week, it appears that Microsoft announced new integration of Windows Live Hotmail and Bing. While it’s fine and dandy for the two products to work together, they announced a feature that has existed since February. Heck, they even own up to it:

We announced in February that Windows Live was piloting a new feature unique to Hotmail we’re calling “quick add.”

They went on to say that they were adding Bing integration to the “quick add” feature (the currently available options for which can be seen to your right). In reality, nothing at all changed with this feature. Don’t get me wrong, this could be a very useful thing, but every single option that is there was there yesterday, and as I recall, has been for a long while. Obviously, before June it was powered by Live Search, but as far as I know, it worked for the past month too.

Apparently, there’s not much new in the Hotmail department.

Google Analytics came along, and (thanks to the assumption that Google is great at everything) singlehandedly convinced many publishers to rely on Google Analytics instead of tools available to most publishers on their web servers. Granted, Google Analytics was easier to access and read, but it still didn’t provide as much raw data as most web developers and content pushers needed.

Then came Microsoft’s own analytics tool, tied to its beta advertising program, titled “AdCenter Analytics.” If you take a look at the html source for this page and look at the bottom, you’ll see that we’ve got both Google Analytics and AdCenter Analytics running, which provides us with a unique insight into how they both work. Keeping it brief, Microsoft’s tools provided far more usable information and was generally easier to navigate than Google Analytics, and while I use both, I’m likely going to keep using AdCenter for as long as possible, which brings me to the subject of its closure.

Microsoft put out this email to all AdCenter Analytics testers, which you can catch after the jump.

Dear Bryant,
The Microsoft adCenter Analytics^Beta team is announcing the end of the adCenter Analytics beta program. The program has been closed, but Analytics will remain available to you through December 31, 2009. Please note that all hosted services, data collection, and technical support will end at that time. If you would like to save your historical data, please use the export feature to download your reports before December 31, 2009.
The Analytics team wants to sincerely thank you for your participation and your contributions to the program. Our objectives at the outset were to serve the needs of small and midsize business customers, as well as evolve the Microsoft strategy to encompass web analytics.
The beta program was a success in every respect. The insights you’ve contributed through your use of the tool and your feedback have helped us immeasurably in shaping Microsoft’s future in web analytics. Your feedback has helped us confidently determine that we can serve advertisers and publishers best by offering a tailored solution that meets more specialized needs.
You can rely on our continuing e-mail support through December 31, 2009. We recommend that you use the coming months to evaluate your web analytics needs and begin searching for an alternative web analytics solution. Click here for a list of companies that offer comparable analytics solutions.
For additional information, visit the adCenter Analytics blog and its award winning content. The blog will be renamed “Insights and Analysis” and will remain focused on advertiser ROI and optimization.
Again, thank you for your participation. We appreciate your contribution.

Sincerely,
The Microsoft adCenter Analytics Team

[Many links removed. ~Bryant]

PROTIP: If you were a user of AdCenter Analytics, I’m going to suggest that you manually export the reports and keep using AdCenter Analytics until the closure date. The reports pushed out by AdCenter are some of the best and easiest to interpret reports available to web developers and content publishers. If you need more information, the Analytics Blog link above is the best place to look.

R.I.P, AdCenter Analytics. Even though you were likely just a massive data-mining project for Microsoft, you were one of the best tools I’ve ever used.