Behavioral targeting – hotting up

I notice that not too many people talk much about Hotmail these days. It appears that given the plethora of “Ajax based” and other popular email services such as Gmail and Yahoo! mail, Hotmail seems to have taken a backseat. Yet, I would rate Hotmail as one of the epoch making events in the evolution of the internet. Reason, it basically heralded a new economic model, which has since become a key characteristic of the interent era, which is to offer a service free of cost to the end user, and monitize it by means of advertising. And with time, this model too evolved and became more sophisticated, and now, in a sense we seem to be back to where it all began, thanks to how things have shaped up and led us to what is now being called behavioral targeting.