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Filed under: Internet, E-mail, Web services, Google, Yahoo!, Social Software

Social networks of the future could be email based

Yahoo! Mail
While Facebook, Friendster and MySpace are the big names in social networking these days, tomorrow's social networking giants could be Yahoo! and Google. And we're not talking about Google's OpenSocial platform.

The New York Times' Saul Hansel suggests that Yahoo! and Google are working on bringing social networking features to your email account. Think about it. What's the first thing that happens when you sign up for Facebook? The service scans your email address book to find friends who are already members. There's a lot of valuable information in your inbox. So it makes sense that the companies providing your email service might want to build on that information and give you a few more reasons to stick around their site all day.

Yahoo! is working on "Inbox 2.0," or a way to make your inbox a bit more social. For example, users will be able to build profiles so that if you click on the name of a person who sends you a message, you should be able to find out more about them. Yahoo! is also working on technology that will analyze your relationships with the people you are sending and receiving mail from. Rather than display your email chronologically, your email could be organized based on your relationship with the sender.

Google's plans are a bit less clear, but Hansel reports that they are definitely up to something.

Filed under: E-mail, Yahoo!, Beta

Is Yahoo! dropping the beta from Yahoo! Mail Beta?

yahoo mail beta
Yahoo! seems to be celebrating the 10th anniversary of Yahoo! Mail by slowly removing the beta tag from the updated version of its webmail service.

Last week a Download Squad reader wrote in to let us know that when he logged into Yahoo! there was no "beta" label under the logo. This morning we went and logged in ourselves and lo and behold, the beta is no more. Yahoo! is also highlighting some of the previously announced new features in its mail client, including the ability to send SMS messages from Yahoo! Mail and to chat with Windows Live contacts.

When you login there's also a good chance your default color scheme will be blue. But you have the option of choosing from 6 different color schemes, so customize away.

If you're less than smitten with the new Yahoo! Mail, you can still switch back to the "classic" view. While the newer version has nifty features like drag-and-drop folder management, it tends to load a lot slower than the classic version of Yahoo! Mail.

[Thanks Mohit!]

Filed under: E-mail, Yahoo!

Yahoo! Mail turns 10

Yahoo! MailYahoo! Mail celebrates its 10th birthday today. Or it would if it were, you know, a person and not a web-based software application.

Anyway, 10 years ago today Yahoo! launched its webmail client. At the top you could get a whopping 3MB of storage. Now Google offers 3GB of free storage, while Yahoo! users get "unlimited" space for their messages.

A lot of things have changed in ten years. Spam wasn't much of a problem in 1997, and most people wouldn't think of attaching digital photos to e-mails because digital cameras weren't widely available.

Yahoo! has put together a little survey to find out how your e-mail habits have changed over the past decade. But we just have one question: do you still use Yahoo! Mail or has Google, Microsoft, or another service stolen your heart in the last ten years?


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