On the heels of AOL’s Bebo social inbox unveiled last week, Yahoo on Monday introduced more updates to its mail service. The idea is to offer a “smarter inbox” experience. The new features will roll out in the coming months.
Call it the next generation of Yahoo Mail. It’s the latest measure in the company’s initiative to deliver more personally relevant starting points on the Web by integrating social functionality and opening up products to content and services outside the Yahoo network.
“Yahoo Mail users have told us that they want to be more productive when they get to their inbox, and they want help breaking through the clutter and getting to the communications that matter most to them,” said John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail. “We’ve created a smarter inbox experience to address the problem of inbox overload. We’re also embedding really useful applications directly into the inbox, which should help people be even more efficient when they get to Yahoo Mail.”
Addressing Changing Needs
Yahoo said its goal with the next generation of Yahoo Mail is to address the changing communications needs of consumers. To Yahoo, that means streamlining access to the most relevant and useful information — and helping users become more productive — in their inbox.
A new feature is a welcome page that surfaces messages, information and activity updates from the people users care about most. There’s also an updated inbox and folder view that filters messages from those personal connections. The new Yahoo mail also gives users access to third-party applications that can leverage the user’s e-mail content, calendar and contacts.
There’s an idealistic dimension and an advertising dimension to Yahoo’s new inbox, according to Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence.
“There’s the effort to make e-mail more functional and more convenient to use Yahoo Mail so…