by Playfuls Staff |
13th February 2007
The most popular mail service in the world (with more than 257 million people accessing it on a regular basis) has now added the famous Yahoo Messenger among its features. Gmail, Google’s mail service, has been offering the same feature for about a year to all of its subscribers.[more]
First presented as one of Yahoo’s important projects in November 2006 at the Web 2.0 conference, the Yahoo! Mail- Yahoo! Messenger integration is now ready to make its debut. More than 73 million people all over the world use the Yahoo Messenger and more than 257 million access Yahoo’s mail service, so a merger of the two was logical.
Yahoo said that the mail IM client will be offered progressively in the following months to Yahoo Mail subscribers. The company took the same step-by-step approach last year when the new Yahoo Mail service (which is still in Beta) was first introduced to a limited number of beta-testers. Ryan Kennedy, lead engineer on the Yahoo! Mail Web Service and Yahoo! Mail Beta Evangelist, confirms: “we’ll be rolling out the feature gradually, so, unfortunately, not everyone will have access immediately.”
Up until now, tech-savvy youngsters have easily switched between Yahoo’s Mail and IM services, but the same maneuver was pretty difficult for adults with a poorer Web or tech culture (especially installing and configuring the IM client). Yahoo combined the two in such manner that a Web user only needs to open the Web-mail account in the browser, without needing any downloading or installations of additional software.
By providing this new feature Yahoo hopes to make the web-mail service more attractive to customers, since it is one of the most important sources of profit from advertisement. Programs like Outlook or Thunderbird “grab” the e-mails without the advertisement banners from Yahoo’s servers, which makes the difficult (if not impossible) for companies to reach their potential clients. This has been a major concern at Yahoo and Microsoft, both giants having operated changes in the layout of their Web-mail pages, to make them look more like Outlook or Thunderbird.
Yahoo had also decided to give away the underlying code of the Yahoo Mail application, one of the crown jewels of its business, in a bid to encourage software developers to build new applications based on e-mail. A suite of thousands new applications is expected to emerge from independent developers, which should enrich Yahoo Mail’s content. But Yahoo Flikr is the best example of applications called “mashups”- a kind of software combination from different sources (hybrid Web applications).
Up until now only Yahoo’s broadband partners, such as BT or AT&T, have had access to the innards of the e-mail program.
John Kremer, vice president of Yahoo Mail, said in a phone interview with Reuters that embedding instant messaging makes e-mail "an even more social experience" -- by transforming how one communicates from a letter-writing experience into a back-and-forth chat.
"We are hopefully bridging the gap between e-mail users and IM users," Kremer said. "There is still a chunk of Yahoo Mail users who aren't using IM."
"Yahoo! is focused on making it easier for people to connect to those who matter most to them. By bringing Yahoo!'s leading instant messaging capabilities to e-mail users, we're transforming Yahoo! Mail into a tool that's about communicating; regardless of the form that communication takes."
According to Hitwise, Yahoo’s mail service is visited by approximately 42% of Americans, followed by MSN Hotmail with 23% and MySpace mail with 19,5%. Gmail is trailing far behind with only 2.54% percent.
