Yet Another Reason to Love Yahoo Mail – It Is Open and Social Now

We have already discussed Yahoo’s impressive plans to make its products and services open by giving place to third-party applications and now we already see some of these plans turning into reality - or at least into a limited testing stage for some of the Yahoo users. Fans of Yahoo! Mail will feel significant changes pretty soon as their inbox is turning into “smarter inbox” as described by Yahoo team.

At a press event in San Francisco yesterday Yahoo announced their next steps in implementing their open strategy. A few products will feature signs of the open strategy starting today, including Yahoo Mail, My Yahoo, Yahoo toolbar and Yahoo media properties (Yahoo Music was mentioned in particular).

But the most significant changes will probably arrive to Yahoo Mail as they are important to as many as 275 million users worldwide. The new features include prioritizing email messages that are of the highest importance, performing tasks like viewing photos or invitations from other services without leaving the inbox or watching emails from your contacts only to easier sort through the mail.

But of course the most important part that is announced today is availability of third-party applications that a user can choose to work in the sidebar. The applications introduced by the launch partners are Flixster, Flickr, Photos by Xoopit, Family Journal, and WordPress. New applications will be sure to arrive in the future with Yahoo gradually selecting new developers reliable enough to create applications for Yahoo Application Platform.

But even the initially existing applications already add significant value to Yahoo Mail users. For example, Flickr application allows you to easily drop any of the photos in your Flickr account right into the email you want to send while the Wordpress application will allow you to easily convert an email into a blog post.

This is obviously the “open” part of the announcement but there is also a “social” part to it - the one that turns Yahoo into a social network. To make it possible Yahoo introduces a notion of “connections” where various account owners can be suggested as “connections” for you to be able to track updates of their use of various services and see what they are up to - same as what you do on a social network like Facebook but right from your Yahoo Mail interface.

The new features will be rolled out to all Yahoo users during the first half of 2009 so you should not expect to get your hands on the shiny new functionality just yet with some social features launching in the US and Australia today but they will take time to become available to everyone everywhere and even the US and Australian users will still have a limited functionality first. But from what Yahoo has decided to show we will most certainly see many impressed users falling in love with their Yahoo accounts once again.

I have already heard some of my good friends in the tech community admitting that they secretly love Yahoo Mail much more than they love Gmail but since this is not a very trendy application they prefer to keep silence about their secret passion. But now that Yahoo is doing something that is described with words “open” and “social” these people will probably finally reveal their true feelings and we will have more bloggers covering Yahoo Mail now.

Here is the video from Yahoo Team demonstrating the new smarter inbox: