On Monday, the Associated Press reported that in an attempt to keep its head above water, search company Yahoo! is revamping the features of its email service-- smartly integrating, as many web services have, tools to beef up its social presence on the Internet.
Co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang outlined ideas for such enhancements back in January of this year... and as the AP comments, just about a year later, the project is finally underway.
Yahoo! Mail boasts an estimated 275 million users. As of Monday, a small group of members was allowed to test the functions, which should be ready for the public within the next few weeks. After that, all members will be given the opportunity to register their accounts with popular social networking websites MySpace and Facebook. Over the past few years, these two networks have grown immensely in fan-base, functionality, and everything in between.
By integrating their Yahoo! Mail account with either of these social networks, Yahoo! users will be able to make new Facebook friends, get in touch with old pals on MySpace, and enjoy the same give-and-take of information these networks encourage daily.
Enjoy searching your inbox for specific messages based on keywords? Yahoo! is also hoping to expand this concept by hosting an application "developed for finding photos stored in their mailboxes."
Another new element of Yahoo! Mail set to unroll this week is the freshly opened platform to third-party developers. We have seen successful examples of this employed by (once again) Facebook, MySpace, and Google's iGoogle homepages. Introducing third-party programmers to create and compete with their dynamic widgets allows users to fully customize their pages and enjoy them in a whole new way.
Lastly, the Yahoo! toolbar will be seeing some improvements too, including a popup notification feature with friend activity alerts, new incoming mail, and other information as well.
Yahoo VP John Kremer commented on these enhancements with an optimistic outlook: "We hope opening up Yahoo mail will have a game-changing influence on the industry."
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