YAHOO has launched the first features of its long-anticipated new email service, designed to make its Yahoo Mail more “social,” in the Facebook and MySpace sense of the word.
From today, about 275 million Yahoo Mail users – including those on the Yahoo7 Australian service – will have the option of adopting the “smarter inbox” features that give the email service more social networking features.
The smarter inbox features were first previewed at the Consumer Electronics Show last January by Yahoo founder and former chief executive Jerry Yang.
The launch was broadly detailed yesterday on the company’s official blog.
It is a part of the broader Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS), and like Facebook and MySpace, allows third-party developers to offer social applications through the Yahoo Mail platform.
The company said its’ smarter inbox is Yahoo’s largest-scale implementation of the Y!OS initiative, bringing to life the open and social efforts the company has been making in its consumer products.
“Yahoo Mail users have told us that they want to be more productive when they get to their inbox and they want help breaking through the clutter and getting to the communications that matter most to them,” Yahoo Mail vice-president John Kremer said.
“We've created a smarter inbox experience to address the problem of inbox overload. We're also embedding really useful applications directly into the inbox, which should help people be even more efficient when they get to Yahoo! Mail,” he said.
Among the limited third party applications being offered from today are photo apps like Flickr, and inbox connections into blogs like WordPress, as well as broad applications such as tools for creating ‘family journals,’ or Flixter’s sharing movie ratings system.
The new inbox will be opened up to other third-party applications next year.
