San Francisco — Just about a year after outgoing CEO Jerry Yang envisioned for a “New Yahoo,” and since months of preamble, Yahoo on Monday flipped the on switch for a massive project to begin interlacing trendy social-networking features into its popular free email service as it vies to be the preferred launching point for Internet surfers.
“Blitz of breathtaking announcements for Mail and home page fills out Yahoo’s ‘open’ social Web strategy.”
The Web pioneer unveiled a new toolbar that delivers on a major new look for its venerable Home Page and popular Yahoo Mail service at a press event here, giving users access to their e-mail as they surf the Web, the latest step in its strategy to make its products more open to users and third parties.
“We are designing a better, more relevant user experience,” said Ash Patel, executive vice president of Yahoo’s audience products division. “And we are introducing Yahoo more for third parties to leverage.”
The company has been long since busy developing the recently launched features mostly behind the scenes to what it calls the “Yahoo Open Strategy,” but now the strategy’s changes will become evident to U.S. users of some of Yahoo’s main properties such as Yahoo Mail, My Yahoo, and Yahoo’s music and TV sites. In addition, the company will begin previewing a new Yahoo Toolbar later this week.
“We wanted to introduce a social dimension,” Patel, said of the Yahoo Open Strategy goals. And to attract programmers who can build applications on Yahoo properties, “We intend to engage with the developer community and to open up the power of Yahoo’s products and platforms.”
Key elements of today’s announcements include a revamped Yahoo Mail and Yahoo home page. Yahoo said it is offering tools that let people use its email service to build interactive communities based on friends and interests.
“Yahoo Mail is the largest dormant social graph,” Yahoo Mail vice president John Kremer said while outlining enhancements to the service used by 275 million people worldwide every month, according to comScore.
“This is the first time we are exposing that in a significant way.”
Yahoo Mail now boasts a “Smarter Inbox” that gives higher priority display of e-mail you care most about or receive most regularly — from friends and colleagues for example. The smarter inbox allows you to filter messages from friends or family in a separate, tabbed file so they does not get buried under mountains of spam or work email.
The news smarter inbox for the first time allows people to integrated third-party applications with Yahoo Mail such as Family Journal for creating a family tree, movie-recommendation service Flixster for sharing reviews, show times and related info, and blogging tools from WordPress for quickly posting photos and links from e-mail into a blog.
Technology from startup Xoopit (sounded out: swoop-it) will fetch all pictures hidden in stored emails, even retrieving images from website links found in messages.
“Email is a place where a lot of people live,” said Xoopit co-founder Bijan Marashi.
“Yahoo users have years of gems in old emails. There are hundreds of millions of people not on social networks, but with years of data in their email.”
Marashi extracted his three-year-old email account as an example, revealing it held 7,745 pictures.
Yahoo stated that the new mail attributes will be rolled out on a limited basis over the next several months and refined further. Yahoo is also integrating its popular Flickr photo sharing application from within Yahoo Mail as well as Yahoo Greetings to create and send e-cards right from within the Mail application.
Patel said even though the popularity of photo-sharing sites, e-mail is still the most common way people share photos. “There are more photos in attachments shared in Yahoo Mail in a week, than are updated to Flickr in a year,” he said. “It is an activity people use all the time.”
“People are spending a lot of time on the Web, there is a lot of inefficiency,” said Kremer. He further added that Yahoo’s new offerings are intended to surface the e-mails and applications people want to see and use most directly without switching to a separate application screen.
Forrester analyst Julie Katz is impressed by Yahoo’s moves, but believes it is going to take some time for the new features to gain traction. “Consumers will have to retrain their behavior,” she said in a statement. You have to have a registered Yahoo profile to get the filtering features.
“The launching of the new mail platform is a huge benefit to users in terms of the additional forms of sharing and communication we can build in and to the developers who can build applications,” said Kremer, speaking to reporters at a launch event here.
More mail changes are coming, he said. Among them will be birthday reminders and the ability to exchange large files, Kremer said.
Forrester’s Katz said Yahoo is adding a lot of utility with Flickr and Xoopit on its e-mail page. “Being able to search through your mail box and get a view of all your photos is incredibly useful,” she said.
In the long run, she said Yahoo is making the right moves to keep its users happy and fend off migration to social sites like Facebook.
A new toolbar for Web browsers also gets drop-down interactivity that can show what a person’s contacts are doing, what e-mail has been received, and other information. A “sneak preview” version of the toolbar will be available later this week for download.
The Yahoo toolbar available later this week will allow users access to a selected group of programs from the toolbar without leaving the page they are on.
For example, users get notifications of new e-mails on the toolbar and can open them. The Internet Company also showed off a newly styled in-box, which combines social networking functions and also allows users access to third party programs.
Yahoo’s move is the latest salvo in an escalating war to become the preferred base of operations for people’s increasingly immersive and diverse online activities, according to Flixster co-founder Joe Greenstein.