Yahoo Opens Mail, Toolbar To Social Networks

Yahoo on Monday unveiled the first meaningful work it has done to turn itself into a social platform: a social in-box for Yahoo Mail, third-party applications on its My Yahoo start page, and new a Yahoo Toolbar.

Yahoo's new open platform, referred to as Yahoo Open Strategy, or Y!OS, represents the company's attempt to reinvent itself as a social network.

The company introduced Y!OS in April with the launch of Search Monkey, its search developer platform. Other parts of Y!OS, like the Fire Eagle geo data platform and new Yahoo account profiles, have surfaced but have had relatively little impact on Yahoo's users.

Monday's announcement brings a major change to Yahoo Mail, the company's most widely used service.

Yahoo Mail now allows filtering based on one's Yahoo friends, which Yahoo now calls Connections. In time, it will also allow filtering based on one's Yahoo Mail contacts and other criteria.

Designating someone as a Connection is a process similar to "friending" someone on Facebook.

Yahoo Mail now includes a Welcome page with messages from Connections and with Update notifications from other socially enabled applications.

"We've long talked about mail being a dormant social graph; this is the first time we're exposing that in a very big way," said John Kremer, VP of Yahoo Mail. "This is a step toward prioritizing the in-box in all the ways that our customers want."

Yahoo is also changing My Yahoo and Yahoo Toolbar so they work as social applications.

My Yahoo is now a lot more like iGoogle: It's a Web page that users can personalize with embeddable applications from Yahoo or third-party developers. And just like iGoogle, My Yahoo users will have themes, through the new My Yahoo Themes API.

The difference between My Yahoo and iGoogle, said Cody Sims, senior director of product management for Y!OS, is that the Yahoo apps can reach across Yahoo's platform rather than being restricted to one area like iGoogle.

The new Yahoo Toolbar will be offered as preview software later this week. It provides easy access to Yahoo Mail, other Web-based e-mail providers, and other applications regardless of where one has roamed on the Net. It will include Updates on the activities of one's Connections and will provide new search suggestions and vertical search options. The big news for developers is that Yahoo has started limited beta testing of third-party apps in Yahoo Mail.

One such app, Xoopit, scours one's Yahoo Mail account and organizes all the images and links to photo-sharing sites that it finds and makes those pictures easy to redistribute. Another is Yahoo's own Flickr, which has been integrated with Yahoo Mail to make image sharing easier. And Yahoo Mail users with WordPress blogs can now drag an e-mail message onto the WordPress icon in Yahoo Mail and turn that message into a blog post that can be published with one additional click.

On one level, the new Yahoo Mail is unimpressive and merely serves to underscore how far behind browser-based e-mail clients are from desktop e-mail clients, which have had ways to filter messages based on a variety of criteria for years.

On another level, the new Yahoo Mail represents the birth of a social network with 500 million users. That's clearly the level Yahoo wants to be on, but it remains unclear how many Yahoo users want to be there.

One way to measure that is by the number of Yahoo users who have embraced the new profiles the company launched in October.

Yahoo declined to provide that number. Had every single user done so, Yahoo surely would have said something. So it's something less than everyone, which is hardly surprising given that the company only retrofitted its profile system to accommodate social interaction two months ago. The question is whether enough Yahoo users want a social experience to make developers want their online applications on Yahoo.

In reference to Yahoo's corporate pulse, the company held a press event in San Francisco at Outcast Communications, its public relations firm, rather than at Yahoo's Brickhouse, where previous Yahoo platform events had been held. Last week, TechCrunch reported that Yahoo's Brickhouse, its 2-year-old idea incubator, would close by the end of the year. A Yahoo spokeswoman said she couldn't comment on rumors.

Valleywag predicted as much back in February. True or not, word of Brickhouse's demise arrived last week alongside Yahoo's layoffs, serving to underscore the company’s need for new leadership and a new beginning.