A few months ago, we heard a rumor that Yahoo! was developing a new social network platform based around the internet portal's popular email client. This week Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang gave a sneak peek at Yahoo! Life, or the service formerly known as Inbox 2.0.

The email inbox is at the core of Yahoo! Life, and you can communicate with your email contacts in a number of ways. Yahoo! will put your incoming email messages in order based on its understanding of which contacts are the most important to you. You'll be able to access other Yahoo! services including Yahoo! Maps and Messenger. The ultimate goal is to have Yahoo! service work together so that for example if you have receive an email asking for a good place to eat, you can drag it into a map to get suggestions.

You'll also be able to access third party applications and services like Evite and MySpace.

Update: It turns out the new services are not called Yahoo! Life. The company has yet to settle on a name, but CEO Jerry Yang referred to the concept during his CES presentation as "Life with an exclamation point."

[via TechCrunch]