Sunnyvale, California — Attempting to tempt people into spending more time on its website, on Tuesday, Yahoo Inc began to roll out a revamped version of its Web-based Yahoo mail product that boasts faster performance, new capabilities, and yes, a place you never want to–or more importantly–have to leave to get your social fix.
That should be great news for the 273 million users that Yahoo Mail claims worldwide, but it is also an important move for the struggling company. Social networking magnets like Facebook have become a key form of communication, but Yahoo believes there is plenty of room left to improve good old email.
David McDowell, a senior director for product management at Yahoo Mail, provided a sneak peek at its improved email product at the company’s “Product Runway” event last month. And now, beginning on Tuesday, you can try out a beta YHOOMailNew test version of the new Yahoo Mail for yourself.
Yahoo’s Mail update brings more speed and Twitter to the equation. (Credit: Yahoo) Click to enlarge…
So what is new? Yahoo states that the new version that begins to roll out Wednesday will run twice as fast and include several new features. For one thing, Besides, the company claims that an improved search feature makes it easier to cull through the morass of messages that have accumulated in your inbox over the years.
Yahoo has also incorporated some novel capabilities that highlights emails sent from contacts in your address book, helping you read important messages right away. Although it is a simpler version of the Priority Inbox that Google launched earlier this year, which may lack some of the significance of Gmail’s approach, but may also help avoid some of the random mistakes that crop up in Priority Inbox.
Yahoo says that the redesigned version takes inspiration from Yahoo’s iPad and Android clients for the market-leading, Web-based mail service, and not only adds the speed and spam reduction, but also brings Twitter into its fold and, like Microsoft’s updated Hotmail service, can now display photos and videos within users’ inboxes.
You can also instantly glance through the Flicker and Picasa photos your friends email you from directly within Yahoo Mail, instead of clicking a link and viewing the photos on a separate web page. And in addition to typing out traditional email messages, the new Yahoo Mail lets you quickly fire off status updates to Facebook friends, Twitter followers, or Yahoo network connections.
According to PCMag.com quoting Yahoo’s McDowell, about the new mail version. “People spend more than 30 billion minutes a month on Yahoo Mail, so if we make a change, it is significant,” said McDowell. “If you were to stack up users lists of complaints about e-mail, speed and spam would be at the top of the list, and we have tackled both head on with this release. Yahoo Mail has been re-architected from the ground up with speed and performance in mind, and it is actually two times faster than our existing version — much faster to load and much faster to navigate.”
Recently, both Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail have also unleashed a number of new features to their e-mail services. To get the new version, search on Yahoo.com for “Yahoo! Mail Beta” or visit http://features.mail.yahoo.com/ and click “Try It Now.“