Five months ago, Microsoft announced that Hotmail users in Brazil, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K., and the U.S. could begin to chat with their Facebook friends while checking their email.  Now the integration of Hotmail and Facebook Chat is complete in every place where Facebook is available.

We’ll admit: this may not sound like a big deal insofar as it’s pretty simple to toggle between a Hotmail tab and a Facebook tab.  But the development at least goes to show that relations between Microsoft and Facebook are as good as ever.

Microsoft has launched a new feature for Hotmail, providing Hotmail users with aliases so they don’t have to give their primary email address to every site that asks for one, and still don’t have to go create a whole new account. 

At the end of December, some Hotmail users experienced problems with their email – it was gone. Messages and folders went completely missing from their accounts. Luckily, for those users, the emails came back. 

Microsoft says it recovered 100% of email and folders for the accounts affected. Unfortunately, for those who didn’t sign into their accounts between the time of the incident and the time the account was restored, any messages sent to their accounts during that time would have bounced. 

Microsoft has some interesting news out for Hotmail users. The company has partnered with some other companies to bring a new kind of email to the inbox – one that is as up to date as possible, and lets users interact with sites from within the email itself.

Microsoft announced that it is rolling out some new features to Hotmail. These include: the ability to track packages referenced in your email from Hotmail itself, chat with Facebook friends, sharing photos more easily with expanded coverage and new features, viewing more videos from inside Hotmail, and organizing and finding important email with subfolders.

Craiglist CEO Jim Buckmaster wrote a feisty blog post aimed at CNN’s Amber Lyon. It begins:

I see you’ve now gotten around to requesting an interview with me or a company spokesperson, 90 days after you ambushed our namesake and founder, Craig Newmark, following his May 20th talk on veteran’s affairs and other issues unrelated to craigslist, at a conference in Washington.

Microsoft has launched some new Bing Maps integration with Hotmail. When Hotmail users create a new email message, they can insert Bing Maps data.

When a user selects "Maps and Places", a task pane opens, which lets you add new locations or interact with previously defined locations. It will default to the address you have in your Windows live profile. If you add a new place, you can store it in a Bing Maps collection and pick it from a list later.

Microsoft announced that it has completed the roll out of its new Hotmail experience. All customers have now been upgraded.