Microsoft is once again eliminating support for a small but interesting feature for one of its services. Last week, we broke the news that Microsoft would be dropping support for the MySpace network for Windows Live users. Now another one of our readers, dotf, has posted up word on our message boards of a new email he received from Microsoft, this time concerning the Skydrive cloud service.
The message states:
According to our records, you have opted in to our email publishing feature, which enables you to publish photos to your SkyDrive via email. Unfortunately, we are retiring this feature in our next release, and it will no longer be available for use after April 2012. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Please visit our homepage to find alternative ways of uploading photos, and look forward to new and exciting features that are coming in future releases. You may also post any questions to us at www.windowslivehelp.com for additional support.
Microsoft has confirmed this story with us and has sent us a link to a post on the Microsoft Answers web site that explains this decision:
SkyDrive has a feature called Email Publishing that lets you upload photos by sending an email to a special address that you enabled. This feature was designed for people to upload photos when away from their PC – for example on feature phones. With the shift to smartphones, there are now much easier ways for people to upload your photos to SkyDrive. As a result, we are retiring this feature at the end of April.
Going forward, we recommend using SkyDrive for iPhone, SkyDrive for Windows Phone or other mobile apps that work with SkyDrive (e.g. Browser for SkyDrive on Android) to easily upload photos on the go.
Thanks to doft for the tip